Other forms: soaps
You wash your hands with soap, and it makes bubbles. A bar of soap, soap and water, wash with soap.
It works because each molecule has one end that likes water and one that likes grease, so it lifts dirt into the rinse — which is also why twenty seconds of scrubbing matters more than the soap itself. A soap opera is named from the detergent firms that sponsored the early radio serials.
1nounsoapA substance used with water for washing.
“Wash your hands with soap and warm water before you eat.”
soap is a cleaning substance.
Old English sape comes from a Germanic word, itself perhaps from a root meaning to drip or trickle. The Latin sapo was borrowed from Germanic.
Middle English
sope
English, today
soap
Built from
From Middle English sope. From Middle English sope, sape, from Old English sāpe (“soap, salve”), from Proto-West Germanic saipā, from Proto-Germanic saipǭ, from Proto-Indo-European seyb-, seyp- (“to pour out, drip, trickle, strain”). Cognate with Scots saip, sape (“soap”), stq Seepe (“soap”), West Frisian sjippe (“soap”), Dutch zeep (“soap”), German Low German Seep (“soap”), German Seife (“soap”), Danish sæbe (“soap”), Swedish såpa (“soap”), Norwegian Bokmål såpe (“soap”), Norwegian Nynorsk såpe (“soap”), Faroese sápa (“soap”), Icelandic sápa (“soap”), Finnish saippua (“soap”), Finnish suopa (“soft soap”). Related also to Old English sāp (“amber, resin, pomade, unguent”), Latin sēbum (“tallow, fat, grease”). See seep. Latin sāpō (“soap”) is a borrowing from the Germanic.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA