Soakings

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The act of saturating something thoroughly with a liquid
2. The process of being immersed in liquid for an extended period
3. A soaking can refer to both the state of being drenched and the act of drenching something else

Etymology: "Soakings" is simply the plural of "soaking," so the history belongs to that noun. The base verb "soak" goes back to Old English "socian," and the noun grew from it by adding the suffix "-ing," which turns an action into a thing or event. Its earliest recorded form appears in Middle English as "soukynge," and it turns up in the "Promptorium parvulorum," a fifteenth-century English-Latin dictionary compiled around 1440. Because "soaking" is a noun formed by a regular suffix, its meaning stayed close to its literal sense: the act of wetting something through and through. The plural "soakings" simply names several such occasions, as when a field or a set of clothes has received more than one thorough drenching.

Synonyms: drenching, immersion, saturation