Dishwasher

How to spell dishwasher

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce dishwasher

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dishwasher mean?

1. nounA machine that automatically washes dishes, glasses, and cutlery.
2. nounA person employed to wash dishes, especially in a restaurant kitchen.

Dishwasher in a sentence

• He stacked the plates neatly inside the dishwasher before bed.

• The restaurant hired an extra dishwasher for the busy holiday weekend.

• The new dishwasher runs quietly enough to start overnight.

• As a student he worked as a dishwasher in a hotel kitchen.

Where does dishwasher come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound built entirely from native Germanic parts. 'Dish' comes from Old English 'disc', meaning a plate or bowl, which was itself an early borrowing from the Latin 'discus' (a flat plate or quoit); the same root surfaces in 'disc' and 'desk'. 'Wash' descends from Old English 'wascan', meaning to cleanse with water, related to the word 'water' itself. The agent suffix '-er' turns a verb into the person or thing that performs the action, just as 'baker' and 'mixer' do. The combined word first named a person who washed dishes for a living, and only in the twentieth century, after the automatic machine was invented and popularised, did it commonly mean the appliance. Because every piece is familiar, the only real spelling care is remembering the 'sh' digraph in both 'dish' and 'wash'.

How the word is built

• dish (plate or vessel for food)
• wash (to clean with water)
• -er (agent/instrument suffix)