Other forms: polluted, polluting, pollutes
To pollute is to make air, water or soil dirty and harmful. Pollute the river, heavily polluted, pollute the air.
The polluter pays principle is the standard rule in environmental law: whoever caused the damage should meet the cost of it. The Latin behind the word means to defile, and the moral sense came first — you could pollute a temple long before a river.
1verbpolluteTo make air, water or soil dirty and harmful.
“Factories along the river polluted the water with chemicals.”
pollute is a dirtying.
Also accepted in games: contaminate
Latin polluere means to soil or defile. The environmental sense is a nineteenth-century narrowing.
Latin
pollūtum
Middle English
polluten
English, today
pollute
Built from
From Middle English polluten, borrowed from Latin pollūtum, from pollūtus (“no longer virgin", "unchaste”), perfect passive participle of polluō (“soil", "defile", "dishonor”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA