Wax

How to spell wax

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wax

What does wax mean?

1. nounA soft, water-resistant solid such as beeswax or candle wax that melts easily when heated.
2. verbTo coat, polish, or treat a surface with wax.
3. verbTo grow larger or increase, especially of the moon moving toward full.

Wax in a sentence

• noun

  A thin layer of wax sealed the top of each jam jar.

• verb

  He likes to wax the car every weekend until it shines.

• verb

  The moon will wax for the next two weeks until it is full.

• noun

  The candle dripped hot wax onto the wooden table.

• verb

  The technicians wax the skis before each race.

• verb

  Public interest in the project began to wax as the launch approached.

Where does wax come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This little word actually carries two unrelated histories that happen to be spelled and sounded the same. The substance sense comes from the Old English weax, meaning the soft, mouldable material that bees produce, and it has cousins right across the Germanic languages, including Dutch was and German Wachs. The other sense, 'to grow or increase', descends from a different Old English word, weaxan, meaning 'to grow' or 'to become larger', which is distantly related to the Latin augere 'to increase' (the same root behind 'augment'). Over the centuries the verb 'to grow' narrowed in everyday use and now survives mainly in the description of the moon waxing toward full and in the slightly literary phrase 'to wax lyrical'. The spelling stayed admirably short and stable because the word was never reshaped by French or Latin scribes; the simple x captures the original ks sound directly. Because it is so brief and phonetic, wax is one of the rare words where the spelling holds no real ambush.

How the word is built

• wax (single root; from Old English weax 'beeswax', and the separate Old English weaxan 'to grow')