Wastewater
nounWater that has been used and contaminated by domestic, agricultural, or industrial activity and must be treated before reuse or release.
How to spell wastewater
10 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce wastewater
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does wastewater mean?
- nounWater that has been used and contaminated by domestic, agricultural, or industrial activity and must be treated before reuse or release.
Wastewater in a sentence
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The treatment plant processes millions of litres of wastewater every day.
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New regulations limit how much wastewater a factory may discharge into the river.
Where does wastewater come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
This is a transparent English compound, formed by joining 'waste' and 'water'. The first element traces back through Old French 'wast' to the Latin 'vastus', meaning 'empty' or 'desolate', which is also the source of 'vast' and 'devastate'; in English it came to mean material that is discarded or unused. The second element, 'water', is a thoroughly native word descended from Old English 'waeter', with cousins across the Germanic languages such as Dutch 'water' and German 'Wasser'. The combined term is comparatively modern, gaining currency in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alongside municipal sewers and industrial plumbing, when engineers needed a precise label for the used and contaminated water leaving homes and factories. Because both halves are everyday words, the only spelling decision is whether to write it as one word, two words, or hyphenated; modern technical usage settles firmly on the single closed form 'wastewater'.
How the word is built
- waste (refuse, unused)
- water (the liquid); a closed compound noun
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