Other forms: wading, waded, wades
To wade is to walk through water, mud or anything that slows you down. Wade across the stream, wade out to the boat, wading through mud.
It implies effort and depth — you paddle in the shallows and wade when the water pushes back. Wade through is very common figuratively for slow difficult reading: wade through the paperwork. Wade in means to join a fight or argument forcefully, and wade into is the same. Note wading bird, the name for herons, storks and their long-legged relatives, and waders, the waterproof trousers anglers wear.
1verbwadeTo walk through water or something that slows you.
“They waded across where the river widens.”
2verbworkTo work slowly through something long and dull.
“She waded through six hundred pages of it.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
wade is a way of moving through resistance.
Old English wadan simply meant to go, from a root that also gives Latin vadere, to walk — the source of invade and evade. English narrowed the plain word for going down to the one kind of going that is hard work.
Proto-Indo-European
*weh₂dʰ- — to go
Proto-Germanic
*wadaną — to go, pass through
Proto-West Germanic
*wadan
Old English
wadan
Middle English
waden
English, today
wade
From Middle English waden, from Old English wadan, from Proto-West Germanic wadan, from Proto-Germanic wadaną (“to go, pass through”), from Proto-Indo-European weh₂dʰ- (“to go”). Cognates include stq waadje (“to wade”), West Frisian wâdzje (“to wade”), Dutch waden (“to wade”), German Low German waden (“to wade”), German waten (“to wade”), Danish vade (“to wade”), Swedish vada (“to wade”), Icelandic vaða (“to wade”), and Latin vādō (“go, walk; rush”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA