Other forms: washed, washing, washes
To wash is to clean something with water. Wash your hands, wash the car, wash up. It is the everyday word and it is regular.
The phrasal verbs split by country and confuse everybody. Wash up in British English means to do the dishes; in American English it means to wash your hands and face. Do the washing means the laundry; do the washing-up means the dishes — both British. A wash is one cycle of laundry: put it in the wash. And there is a lovely idiomatic use: it will all come out in the wash means the truth will emerge eventually, and no harm done.
1verbwashTo clean something with water and usually soap.
“Wash your hands before you eat.”
2nounclothesClothes being or waiting to be washed.
“That shirt is in the wash.”
3verbcarryOf water, to carry something along or against.
“The tide washed the boat right up the beach.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
wash is a way of cleaning.
Old English wascan comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning wet — the same root as water and, at a distance, whisky, which is Gaelic for water of life. Washing is the oldest thing English does with water.
Middle English
wasshen
English, today
wash
From Middle English wasshen. From Middle English wasshen,waschen,weschen (“to wash”), from Old English wascan (“to wash”), from Proto-West Germanic waskan (“to wash”), from Proto-Germanic waskaną,watskaną (“to wash, get wet”), from Proto-Indo-European wed- (“wet, water”). Cognate with stq waaske (“to wash”), West Frisian waskje (“to wash”), Dutch wassen, wasschen (“to wash”), Low German waschen (“to wash”), German waschen (“to wash”), Danish vaske (“to wash”), Faroese - and Icelandic vaska (“to wash”), Norwegian Bokmål vaske (“to wash”), Norwegian Nynorsk vaske, vaska (“to wash”), Swedish vaska* (“to wash”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA