Other forms: sweating, sweats, sweated
Sweat is the salty water your skin makes when you are hot or frightened. It cools you down as it dries.
The body's purpose for it is temperature, but English has long treated it as the mark of effort, which gives us sweat and toil, the sweat of your brow, and no sweat, meaning no trouble at all. As a verb it covers worry as well as heat, since sweating over a decision has nothing to do with the weather. Cooking borrows it precisely, since to sweat onions is to cook them gently until they soften without colouring.
1nounsweatThe salty liquid produced by the skin when hot or anxious.~67%
“Sweat ran down the back of his neck.”
2verbproduceTo produce sweat, or to be anxious.~33%
“He sweated over the letter for an hour.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Sweat has needed almost no revision since Proto-Indo-European: sweyd, to sweat, through Proto-Germanic swaitą to Old English swāt. Some words simply arrive finished.
Proto-Indo-European
*sweyd-
Proto-Indo-European
*swoyd- — to sweat
Proto-Germanic
*swait-
Old English
swāt
Middle English
swete
English, today
sweat
Built from
From Middle English swete, swet, swate, swote, from Old English swāt, from Proto-Germanic swait-, swaitą, from Proto-Indo-European swoyd- (“to sweat”), o-grade of sweyd- (“to sweat”). Cognate with West Frisian swit, Dutch zweet, German Schweiß, Danish sved, Norwegian Bokmål svette, Norwegian Nynorsk sveitte, Swedish svett, Yiddish שוויצן (English shvitz), Latin sudor, French sueur, Italian sudore, Spanish sudor, Portuguese suor, Persian خوی (“sweat”), Sanskrit स्वेद, Lithuanian sviedri, txb syā-, Albanian djersë, and Welsh chwys.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA