Clean

Part of speech: adjective, verb

Pronunciation: /kliːn/

Definitions

1. To make free from dirt, stains, or unwanted elements while also representing a state of purity and moral clarity in character and intentions
2. Not containing dirt, stains, or contaminants; to remove dirt or impurities from something
3. Pure and free of any impurities or unwanted substances; the act of cleansing or making something free of dirt

Etymology: The English word began as a word for smallness and delicacy rather than cleanliness. Old English "clǣne" meant "clean, pure, clear", but its Proto-West Germanic ancestor, "*klainī", carried the sense of dainty, fine or small, and German "klein" and Dutch "klein" still mean "small" today. The same root turns up across the Germanic languages, where it describes things that are slight, slender, or weak. Swedish "klen" now means "weak", and Icelandic "klénn" can mean "feeble" or "poor" as well as "pretty" and "snug". Scholars have traced this ancestry back to an Indo-European root meaning "to gleam", which suggests that the earliest sense may have been bright or shining things, later narrowed to fine, neat and unsoiled. That path from the gleaming and the delicate to the spotless is the reason a word meaning "small" became one of the commonest words for "free from dirt" in English.

Synonyms: tidy, neat, clear, unsoiled, spotless

Antonyms: dirty, unclean, filthy, messy, grimy