Wade

How to spell wade

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wade

What does wade mean?

1. verbTo walk with effort through water or some other resistant substance, or figuratively through a slow, demanding task.

Wade in a sentence

• The children rolled up their trousers to wade across the shallow stream.

• Rescue workers had to wade through waist-deep floodwater to reach the house.

Where does wade come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English verb wadan, which meant 'to go forward' or 'to move through something', not specifically through water at first. It belongs to a wider Germanic family, sharing an ancestor with the Dutch waden and the German waten, and even reaching back to a root linked to the Latin vadere, meaning 'to go', the same root that gives us 'invade' and 'evade'. Over the medieval period the English sense narrowed from general movement to the laboured business of pushing through water, mud, or anything that resists the legs. From there it grew the familiar figurative use of forcing your way through a difficult or tedious task, as in wading through paperwork. The spelling trap is purely a sound one: it is pronounced exactly like 'weighed', so the simple w-a-d-e ending has to be held in memory against its noisier homophone.

How the word is built

• wade (single Old English root verb wadan: to go, move forward); no prefix or suffix