Soggy

How to spell soggy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce soggy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does soggy mean?

1. adjectiveHeavy and unpleasantly wet, having soaked up too much liquid.

Soggy in a sentence

• The cereal turned soggy after sitting in milk for ten minutes.

• Days of rain left the campsite a soggy mess of mud and puddles.

Where does soggy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Soggy grew out of the dialectal English noun 'sog', which named a patch of soft, waterlogged ground, a small bog or marsh. That noun is of uncertain origin, though it is widely thought to be related to the verb 'soak', from the Old English 'socian' meaning to steep or lie in liquid, and it may also owe something to a Scandinavian source for words about wet, boggy land. The adjective form appears in writing in the early 1700s, built by adding the familiar '-y' ending and doubling the final consonant, giving the spelling its two central letters that learners sometimes reduce to one. The sense has stayed remarkably stable: from soaked ground it broadened to anything heavy with absorbed moisture, such as bread, fields, or paper. Because the base 'sog' is rare on its own today, the doubled 'g' is the main thing to remember, since the word otherwise sounds and looks deceptively simple.

How the word is built

• sog (a bog or soaked patch of ground)
• -gy (adjective suffix, with the consonant doubled)