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''wax'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''wax'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260125204041-00-⌔

wax - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

wax (countable and uncountable, plural waxes)

  • Beeswax.
  • Earwax.
    • ✤ Synonym: cerumen (medical term)
    • ✤ What role does the wax in your earhole fulfill?
  • Any oily, water-resistant, solid or semisolid substance; normally long-chain hydrocarbons, alcohols or esters.
  • Any preparation containing wax, used as a polish.
    • ✤ Synonym: polish
  • (uncountable, music, informal) The phonograph record format for music.
    • ✤ Synonyms: vinyl, record
    • ✤ What really started the corn sprouting on Broadway was a lugubrious tune by Louisiana’s Jimmie Davis called It Makes No Difference Now. In the late ’30s Decca’s Recording Chief David Kapp heard this Texas hit and got it on wax.1
  • (US, dialect) A thick syrup made by boiling down the sap of the sugar maple and then cooling it.
  • (US, slang) Any of a class of drugs with weed oil and butane as main ingredients; hash oil.
    • ✤ He was charged with two felonies, for possession of Xanax and wax.

Adjective

wax (not comparable)

  • Made of wax.
    • ✤ He looked round the poor room, at the distempered walls, and the bad engravings in meretricious frames, the crinkly paper and wax flowers on the chiffonier; and he thought of a room like Father Bryan’s, with panelling, with cut glass, with tulips in silver pots, such a room as he had hoped to have for his own.2

Verb

wax (third-person singular simple present waxes, present participle waxing, simple past and past participle waxed)

  • (transitive) To coat with wax or a similar material.
    • ✤ * waxed silk*
  • (intransitive) To form a wax (a thick maple syrup).
    • ✤ The syrup is waxing. Come and help yourselves.3

Verb

wax (third-person singular simple present waxes, present participle waxing, simple past and past participle waxed)

  • (transitive) To apply wax to (something, such as a shoe, a floor, a car, or an apple), usually to make it shiny.
    • ✤ Synonyms: buff, shine, polish, furbish, burnish
  • (transitive) To remove hair at the roots from (a part of the body) by coating the skin with a film of wax that is then pulled away sharply.
  • (transitive, informal) To defeat utterly.
  • (transitive, slang) To kill, especially to murder a person.
    • ✤ Synonyms: bump off, knock off, whack; see also Thesaurus: kill
    • ✤ “I was reassigned over from the 9th when the battalion CO got waxed on the road leading in.” Ben kept his dismay to himself. Here was one more officer in the 90th who’d been on the job only hours or days, replacing commanders killed or wounded…4
    • ✤ “You telling me you know who really waxed him and your mom?”
      “Yeah,” she lied.
      “Just who pulled the trigger or who ordered it to be pulled?”      5
  • (transitive, archaic, usually of a musical or oral performance) To record. [from 1900]

Verb

wax (third-person singular simple present waxes, present participle waxing, simple pastwaxed or (archaic) wex or (obsolete) wox, past participlewaxed or (archaic) wex or (obsolete) wox or (dialectal, archaic) waxen)

  • (intransitive, literary) To greaten.
    • ✤ Antonym: wane
    • ✤ Holonym: wax and wane
    • ✤ And then the whole quire hold their hips and laugh,
      And waxen in their mirth and neeze and swear
      A merrier hour was never wasted there.      6
    • ✤ For nature, crescent, does not grow alone
      In thews and bulks, but, as this temple waxes, The inward service of the mind and soul
      Grows wide withal.      7
    • ✤ And so it had always pleased M. Stutz to expect great things from the dark young man whom he had first seen in his early twenties; and his expectations had waxed rather than waned on hearing the faint bruit of the love of Ivor and Virginia—for Virginia, M. Stutz thought, would bring fineness to a point in a man like Ivor Marlay, […].8
  • (intransitive, copulative, literary) To increasingly assume the specified characteristic.
    • ✤ Near-synonyms: become, get, go, turn, come, fall, grow
    • ✤ to wax poetic ― to become increasingly verbose
    • ✤ to wax wode ― to become angry
    • ✤ to wax eloquent
    • ✤ Ah, ſirrah, by my ſay, it waxes late:
      I’ll to my reſt.      9
    • ✤ He waxes desperate with imagination.10
    • ✤ As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit: therefore they are become great, and waxen rich.11
    • ✤ You behold, Sir, how he waxeth Wroth at your Abode here.12
    • ✤ The stars grew pale and paler still till at last they vanished; the golden moon waxed wan, and her mountain ridges stood out against her sickly face.13
    • ✤ In the night, or the gloomy chambers of the day, fears and misgivings wax strong, but out in the sunlight there is, for a time, cessation even of the terror of death.14
  • (intransitive, of the moon) To appear larger each night as a progression from a new moon to a full moon.
  • (intransitive, of the tide) To move from low tide to high tide.

Noun

wax (uncountable)

  • (rare) The process of growing.

Noun

wax (plural waxes)

  • (dated, colloquial) An outburst of anger, a loss of temper, a fit of rage.
    • 1914, James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter 1:
      • ✤ father Arnall’s face looked very black but he was not in a wax: he was laughing.
    • ✤ ‘That’s him to a T,’ she would murmur; or, ‘Just wait till he reads this’; or, ‘Ah, won’t that put him in a wax!’15

Pronunciation

  • enPR: wăks:
    • IPA: /waks/(UK)
    • IPA: /wæks/(US, AU)
      • Audio (US): 🔊
      • Audio (Australian): 🔊
    • IPA: /wɛks/(New Zealand)
    • Rhymes: -æks
    • Homophones: whacks; wacks (wine–whine merger)
  • (obsolete, nonstandard) enPR: wĕks, IPA: /wɛks/16

Etymology 1

From Middle English wax, from Old English weax, from Proto-Germanic ﹡wahsą, possibly from Proto-Indo-European ﹡woḱ-so-.

Cognate with Saterland Frisian Woaks (“wax”), West Frisian waaks (“wax”), Dutch was (“wax”), German Wachs (“wax”), German Low German Wass (“wax”), Luxembourgish Wuess (“wax”), Vilamovian wāhs (“wax”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk voks (“wax”), Faroese vaks (“wax”), Icelandic, Swedish vax (“wax”); and with Lithuanian vaškas (“wax”), Proto-Slavic ﹡voskъ (“wax”).

🖼️ ➺

Etymology 2

From Middle English waxen, from the noun (see above).

Etymology 3

From Middle English waxen, from Old English weaxan (“to wax, grow, be fruitful, increase, become powerful, flourish”), from Proto-West Germanic ﹡wahsan, from Proto-Germanic ﹡wahsijaną (“to grow”), from Proto-Indo-European ﹡h₂weks- (“to grow, increase”).

Cognate with Scots wax (“to grow”), West Frisian waakse (“to greaten”), Low German wassen, Dutch wassen (“to greaten”), German wachsen (“to greaten”), Danish and Norwegian vokse (“to greaten”), Swedish växa (“to greaten”), Icelandic vaxa (“to greaten”), Gothic 𐍅𐌰𐌷𐍃𐌾𐌰𐌽 (wahsjan, “to grow”); and with Ancient Greek ἀέξειν (aéxein), Latin auxilium. It is in its turn cognate with augeo. See eke.

Etymology 4

Uncertain; probably from phrases like to wax angry, wax wode, and similar (see Etymology 2, above).

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1943, Time: ↩

  2. 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter X, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC: ↩

  3. 1932, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods: ↩

  4. 2005, David L. Robbins, Liberation Road: A Novel of World War II and the Red Ball Express, page 83: ↩

  5. 2009, Dean R. Koontz, Ed Gorman, Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: City of Night, →ISBN, page 106: ↩

  6. c. 1595–1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, “A Midsommer Nights Dreame”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene i]: ↩

  7. c. 1599–1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene iii], page 155: ↩

  8. 1922, Michael Arlen, “Ep./1/1”, in “Piracy”: A Romantic Chronicle of These Days: ↩

  9. c. 1591–1595 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Romeo and Ivliet”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene v]: ↩

  10. c. 1599–1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene iii], page 257: ↩

  11. 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Jeremiah 5:27: ↩

  12. 1749, Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, volume 2, London: Millar, →OCLC, page 289: ↩

  13. 1885, H. Rider Haggard, chapter 5, in King Solomon’s Mines: ↩

  14. 1900, Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie: ↩

  15. 1970, John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse, New York, published 2007, page 161: ↩

  16. Bingham, Caleb (1808), “Improprieties in Pronunciation, common among the people of New-England”, in *The Child’s Companion; Being a Conciſe Spelling-book […] * ‎, 12th edition, Boston: Manning & Loring, →OCLC, page 77. ↩

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