bleach

Definitions  ·  Examples  ·  Pronunciations  ·  Etymologies  ·  Related  ·  Statistics  ·  Comments  · 
Always remove any silver jewelry when working with chemicals such as bleach, ammonia, alcohol, finger nail polish removers with acetone, and turpentine.

View all »
Definitions (25)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (6)

  1. transitive verb To remove the color from, as by means of chemical agents or sunlight.
  2. transitive verb To make white or colorless.
  3. intransitive verb To become white or colorless.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (12)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (2)

Toggle WordNet definitions WordNet (5)

Toggle elsewhere links Elsewhere on the web

View all »
Examples (50)

  • The smells of urine and vomit and human decay had been disguised by antiseptic, bleach, and pine-scented cleanser, but Abby had smelled the odors that had never disappeared, had only been masked There had been a doctor who had treated her mother, but his name had been something else, not LaBelle. —  Lisa Jackson - Shiver
  • She was as white as you could get without bleach, her forebears having determined early on to retain racial purity insofar as that did not preclude amicable trading relations with the Alaska Natives who made up the majority of the customers who came into the general store. —  A Grave Denied
  • The floors had been well-scrubbed with bleach, and one of the things I testified about was the way that bleach hid all evidence, one of the few things that masked even the goriest scene Why, the defense attorney had wanted to know, would someone remove the footprints, but leave the blood droplets? —  EQMM,January2008
  • It does a good job of cleaning without the smell of bleach, ammonia or vinegar. —  Epinions Recent Content for Home
  • Traces of bleach were also found in syringes and dialysis lines, they said. —  news | WM | http://www.starnewsonline.com
 

Tags

bleach hasn't been tagged yet.

Sign up or sign in to add tags.

Stats

This word has been looked up 80 times.

On Twitter

Photos from

flickr images

Add a related word »
Related

Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Allen's Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms

Suggestions Wordniks Suggest

Used in the same context Used in the Same Context

reddish ·  sandy ·  detergent ·  scorch ·  wet ·  colorless ·  disinfectant ·  bushy ·  silky ·  sparse ·  wither ·  silvery

Used in the same contextWord Family

bleach:   bleached ·  bleaching
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (5)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Middle English blechen, from Old English blǣcan; see bhel-1 in Indo-European roots.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (4)

  1. from Middle English blechen, from Anglo-Saxon blǣcan (= Dutch bleeken = Old High German bleichēn, Middle High German G. bleichen = Icelandic bleikja = Swedish bleka = Danish blege), make white, cause to fade (cf. blācian, become white or pale), from blāc, pale, bleak: see bleak, blake.
  2. from Middle English bleche (blēche), from Anglo-Saxon blǣc, variant of blāc, pale: see bleak, blake, and cf. bleach, v.
  3. from Middle English bleche, from Anglo-Saxon blǣco, paleness, from blāc, pale: see bleak.
  4. A variant of bletch, q. v.
 

Pronunciations
Record your own »

/blitʃ/
by American Heritage

Charts

frequency chart

Bubble size: how much this word was used in a year

Bubble height: used more or less than expected, vs. all uses evenly distributed

You can expect to see this word about twice a month.

Recently looked up

minijack · lima · iridescent · scala · Porter

Recent Favorites

pygopagus · sanglant · Astacus · sweetbread · qualms

Recent Pronunciations

rimshot · qualms · poofter · oh for heaven's sake · embodies