Other forms: stained, staining, stains
A stain is a mark that will not simply wipe off. Coffee down a white shirt, red wine on a carpet, the brown ring a mug leaves on a table.
Stain is the verb as well: berries stain your fingers, tea stains a cup, and whatever stains leaves its colour inside the material rather than on top of it. In a workshop, wood stain is a coloured liquid you brush onto oak or pine to darken it, and there the colouring is the point rather than the accident. Figuratively a stain is damage to a name — a stain on his reputation, a stain on the country's history. Biologists stain slides so that cells show up under a microscope. A spot or a mark sits on the surface; a stain has soaked in.
1nounstainA dirty or coloured mark that has soaked into something and is hard to remove.~25%
“The stain on the tablecloth never quite came out.”
synonyms: mark, blot
2verbleaveTo leave a coloured mark on something, one that soaks in.~49%
“Beetroot stains everything it touches.”
3nounliquidA coloured liquid brushed onto wood to change its colour.~24%
“He put two coats of dark stain on the shelves.”
4noundamageDamage to somebody's good name.~2%
“The scandal left a stain on the whole department.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
stain is a mark.
Stain is a cousin of stone. Middle English steinen came from Old Norse steina, to stain, colour or paint, built on steinn, which meant stone and also mineral blue, colour, stain. The pigment was ground out of rock, and the word followed the pigment into English. Behind both stands Proto-Germanic *stainaz, stone.
Proto-Indo-European
*steyh₂- — to stiffen
Proto-Germanic
*stainaz — stone
gmq-pro
ᛊᛏᚨᛁᚾᚨᛉ
Old Norse
steina — to stain, colour, paint
Middle English
steinen
English, today
stain
Built from
From Middle English steinen, steynen (“to stain, colour, paint”), of gmq origin, from Old Norse steina (“to stain, colour, paint”), from steinn (“stone, mineral blue, colour, stain”), from gmq-pro ᛊᛏᚨᛁᚾᚨᛉ, from Proto-Germanic stainaz (“stone”), from Proto-Indo-European steyh₂- (“to stiffen”). Cognate with Old English stān (“stone”). More at stone. Replaced native Middle English wem (“spot, blemish, stain”), from Old English wamm (“spot, stain”). In some senses, influenced by unrelated Middle English disteynen (“to discolor, remove the colour from"; literally, "de-colour”), from Anglo-Norman desteindre (“to remove the colour from, bleach”), from Old French destaindre (“to remove the color from, bleach”), from des- (“dis-, de-, un-”) + teindre (“to dye”), from Latin tingo.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA