Leach

How to spell leach

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce leach

What does leach mean?

1. verbTo drain away or extract soluble substances as liquid percolates through a material such as soil.

Leach in a sentence

• Heavy rain can leach nitrogen and other nutrients from the topsoil.

• Cheap plastic containers may leach chemicals into hot food.

Where does leach come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English verb 'leccan', which meant to moisten, to wet, or to water something. It is a native Germanic word, related to forms in other old Germanic languages that all carried the sense of liquid soaking or trickling through. Over the centuries the meaning narrowed to the specific idea of water filtering through a substance and carrying dissolved matter away with it, a process important in soap-making, mining, and farming. The familiar modern technical sense, of minerals or chemicals draining out of soil as water passes through, became established in scientific and agricultural writing by the nineteenth century. The big spelling trap is that 'leach' sounds exactly like 'leech', the blood-sucking worm, yet they are unrelated words: 'leech' descends from a separate Old English word for a healer or physician, so keeping the 'a' in 'leach' marks the draining sense apart from the parasite.

How the word is built

• leach (from Old English leccan: to moisten, to water)

Words that sound like leach

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• leech: A bloodsucking aquatic worm that attaches itself to a host to feed on blood.