Cleanse

How to spell cleanse

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cleanse

What does cleanse mean?

1. verbTo make something thoroughly clean or pure, often by washing away dirt, impurities, or guilt.

Cleanse in a sentence

• The nurse used saline to cleanse the wound before bandaging it.

• This lotion is designed to cleanse oily skin without drying it out.

Where does cleanse come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Cleanse descends from the Old English verb clǣnsian, meaning 'to make clean or pure', which was formed directly from clǣne, the ancestor of the modern adjective 'clean'. The -s- in the middle reflects an old Germanic suffix that turned an adjective into a verb of making, much as 'rinse' and 'glaze' carry similar endings. Over the centuries the spoken vowel shortened and the spelling settled with that puzzling -se ending, so the word now sounds like 'clenz' even though it is built on 'clean'. This split between the long vowel of 'clean' and the short vowel of 'cleanse' is exactly the spelling trap: writers expect the two to look alike. The word kept a slightly formal or ritual flavour, which is why it survives in religious, medical, and cosmetic language where plain 'clean' would feel too ordinary.

How the word is built

• clean (free from dirt)
• -se (verbal ending, surviving from Old English clǣnsian)