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steaming

UK/ˈstiː.mɪŋ/
adjectiveB1+Common in everyday speech and writing · #5,982 of 15,258neutral

Steaming means giving off hot vapour. A steaming mug, steaming horses, steaming hot.

The vapour you actually see is condensed droplets, since steam itself is invisible, but the word describes what a cold morning does to anything warm. In British slang, steaming also means very drunk, and steaming mad means furious.

Feral Arts · CC BY 2.0

Definitions of steaming

  1. 1adjectivesteamingGiving off hot vapour.B1+

    “She handed me a steaming bowl of soup.”

steaming is a quality.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *dʰewh₂- — to whirl, waft, stink, shake; steam, haze, smoke

  2. Proto-Germanic

    *staumaz — steam, vapour, breath

  3. Old English

    stēam — steam, hot exhalation, hot breath; that which emits vapour; blood

  4. Middle English

    steem

  5. English

    steam

  6. English, today

    steaming

by surface analysis, steam + -ing. steam comes from Middle English steem, stem, from Old English stēam (“steam, hot exhalation, hot breath; that which emits vapour; blood”), from Proto-Germanic staumaz (“steam, vapour, breath”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰewh₂- (“to whirl, waft, stink, shake; steam, haze, smoke”). Cognate with Scots stem, steam (“steam”), West Frisian steam (“steam, vapour”), Dutch stoom (“steam, vapour”), Low German stom (“steam”), Swedish - dialectal stimma (“steam, fog”), Latin fūmus (“smoke, steam”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

steaming in the wild

  • Double steaming, sometimes called double boiling, is a Chinese cooking technique to prepare delicate food such as bird's nest soup and shark fin soup.

    Double steaming

  • In recent years soil steaming has regained popularity.

    Soil steam sterilization

  • The cooking technique originally referred to dishes cooked in a siru by steaming.

    Jjim

  • Siru-tteok is a type of Korean rice cake (tteok) traditionally made by steaming rice or glutinous rice flour in a siru.

    Siru-tteok

  • Tteok, or steamed rice cake, which is made by steaming powdered rice, then pounding or rolling the dough, itself dates back to 57 B.C.E, along with the siru.

    Siru-tteok

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the stēam family

steamsteaming

steaming — used about once every 1,671 pages · #5,982 · point at the bar for the others