Other forms: polished, polishing
To polish something is to rub it until it shines. A shoe and a brush on newspaper by the back door; the car bonnet going from dull to wet-looking under a cloth; a wooden table you can suddenly see your own face in.
Polish is the stuff in the tin as well as the act — shoe polish, furniture polish, nail polish — and it is the shine itself. Work gets polished too: you polish a speech, polish a draft, polish your Spanish before a trip, and a performance with polish is one that has had every rough edge taken off. Polish off means finish fast, and it is nearly always food. One warning matters more than the rest. With a capital P, Polish is said POH-lish and means of Poland — same six letters, different vowel, no connection whatsoever.
1verbpolishTo rub a surface until it shines.~2%
“He polishes his shoes every Sunday night.”
synonyms: buff, shine up
2nouncreamThe cream, wax or liquid you rub on to make something shine.~2%
“There is a tin of polish under the sink.”
3verbimproveTo improve something by going over it again.~2%
“She spent the whole evening polishing her speech.”
4adjectivelanguageWritten with a capital P and said POH-lish: of Poland, its people or its language.~94%
“Her grandmother spoke Polish at home and English in the shop.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 127 sentences found in the wild and placed 127 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin polio meant to make smooth, and the picture underneath it is rougher than the word sounds. The root behind it means to strike or thrust, and the sense came out of fulling cloth — beating wool in water until the surface closes up and goes even. Polish began as hitting a thing until it shone.
Proto-Indo-European
*pel- (beat)
Proto-Indo-European
*pelh₂- — to drive, strike, thrust
Latin
polio — to polish, make smooth
Middle English
polishen
English, today
polish
From Middle English polishen, from Old French - poliss-, stem of some of the conjugated forms of polir, from Latin polio (“to polish, make smooth”), from Proto-Indo-European pelh₂- (“to drive, strike, thrust”), from the notion of fulling cloth.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA