Splash
verbTo cause liquid to scatter about in noisy drops.
How to spell splash
6 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce splash
What does splash mean?
- verbTo cause liquid to scatter about in noisy drops.
- nounThe sound or mark made when liquid is scattered or struck.
Splash in a sentence
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verb
The children love to splash in the shallow end of the pool.
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noun
The diver hit the water with a tremendous splash.
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verb
Heavy lorries splash muddy water across the pavement.
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noun
A splash of bleach left a pale patch on her jeans.
Where does splash come from?
Language of origin: Other
Splash is an imitative or echoic word, coined to mimic the sound of liquid striking or scattering. It first appears in English in the early 1700s as an emphatic, more forceful version of the older word 'plash', which dated to the 1500s and named the noise of water dabbling against a surface. The opening cluster 'spl-' was added to intensify the effect, a common English habit of front-loading a word with extra consonants to suggest a sudden burst, much as 'splatter' relates to 'spatter'. Because the spelling simply tracks the sound, there is no hidden classical root to decode, which makes it one of the more transparent words in the language. The same playful sound-symbolism later gave us 'splosh', 'splat', and the figurative 'make a splash' for attracting sudden attention.
How the word is built
- splash (imitative root, an emphatic form of the older 'plash' meaning a splashing sound)
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