Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To roll the body about indolently or clumsily in or as if in water, snow, or mud.
- v. To luxuriate; revel: wallow in self-righteousness.
- v. To be plentifully supplied: wallowing in money.
- v. To move with difficulty in a clumsy or rolling manner; flounder: "The car wallowed back through the slush, with ribbons of bright water trickling down the windshield from the roof” ( Anne Tyler).
- v. To swell or surge forth; billow.
- n. The act or an instance of wallowing.
- n. A pool of water or mud where animals go to wallow.
- n. The depression, pool, or pit produced by wallowing animals.
- n. A condition of degradation or baseness.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To roll; tumble about.
- To roll the body in sand, mire, water, or other yielding substance.
- To plunge into some course or condition; dwell with satisfaction in, addict one's self to, or remain in some way of life or habit, especially a sensual or vicious one.
- To roll.
- n. The act of rolling or tumbling, as in sand or mire.
- n. A rolling gait.
- n. A place to which an animal, as a buffalo, resorts to wallow; also, the traces of its wallowing left in the mire. Some localities called by this name (notably the “hog-wallows” of the San Joaquin Valley, in California) are on too large a scale to have been formed in this way. Their origin has not been satisfactorily explained.
- n. The alder-tree.
- To fade away; wither; droop.
- Insipid; tasteless.
Wiktionary
- v. intransitive To roll one's self about, as in mire; to tumble and roll about; to move lazily or heavily in any medium; to flounder; as, swine wallow in the mire.
- v. intransitive To immerse oneself in, to occupy oneself with, metaphorically.
- v. intransitive To roll; especially, to roll in anything defiling or unclean, as a hog might do to dust its body to relieve the distress of insect biting or cool its body with mud.
- v. intransitive To live in filth or gross vice; to disport one's self in a beastly and unworthy manner.
- v. intransitive To wither; to fade.
- n. An instance of wallowing.
- n. A pool of water or mud in which animals wallow.
- n. A kind of rolling walk.
- adj. now dialectal Tasteless, flat.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To roll one's self about, as in mire; to tumble and roll about; to move lazily or heavily in any medium; to flounder.
- v. To live in filth or gross vice; to disport one's self in a beastly and unworthy manner.
- v. Prov. Eng. & Scot. To wither; to fade.
- v. To roll; esp., to roll in anything defiling or unclean.
- n. A kind of rolling walk.
- n. Act of wallowing.
- n. A place to which an animal comes to wallow; also, the depression in the ground made by its wallowing.
WordNet 3.0
- v. rise up as if in waves
- v. delight greatly in
- v. devote oneself entirely to something; indulge in to an immoderate degree, usually with pleasure
- n. an indolent or clumsy rolling about
- n. a puddle where animals go to wallow
- v. roll around,
- v. be ecstatic with joy
Etymologies
- (From inflected forms of) Old English wealġ, from Proto-Germanic *walwo-. Cognate with dialectal Norwegian valg ("tasteless"). Compare waugh. (Wiktionary)
- Middle English walowen, from Old English wealwian; see wel-2 in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“I think a wallow is good for the soul on occasion.”
“Later on, he was wont to say that this poverty had been the best possible thing for him, its enforced abstinences having come just at the time when he had begun to "wallow" -- his word for any sort of excess; and "wallowing" was undoubtedly a peril to which Norbert's temper particularly exposed him.”
“If you’ve ever heard Bill Maher speak on the subject of religion, you know my views. hopefully you agree with him. but you can always help yourself. just dont lay there in wallow in your pity and the need for sympathy from others.”
Think Progress » Former GOP Congressman J.C. Watts: ‘Social programs’ are the ‘new slavery.’
“And then, for a short story I fix my eye on the end point and let the rest happen; for a novel I kind of wallow, and try to keep the process playful and not-a-chore and not close off too many possibilities.”
“SHIRK: You can choose to wallow around in self pity and say this sucks, I don't really like it and just kind of wallow around in it, or you can sit there and say, look, this is the reality; how am I going to make the best of it?”
“Confess to absolutely wallowing if a tv-less person can be said to "wallow" in the selfish pleasure of taking one day off from the total dread that is Iraq.”
“We reached a kind of wallow, a muddy bayou filled with weed.”
“Before the haymaking machines and horse-rakes came into vogue, it was not uncommon to see as many as twenty women following each other in _échelon_, turning a "wallow," or shaking up the green swathes left by the mowers.”
“Dick had just reached the "wallow" referred to by Joe Blunt, and had reined up his steed to observe it leisurely, when a faint hissing sound reached his ear.”
“The air, too, was close and oppressive as the breath of an oven; while the surface of the sea was unusually agitated, the run seeming to come from all points of the compass at once, and to meet under the ship, causing her to "wallow" so awkwardly that the water tumbled in over her rail in all directions, now forward, now aft, and anon in the waist, and on either side with the utmost impartiality.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘wallow’.
-
Waves and Waveforms
wave, brainwave, soliton, traveling wave, tidal wave, transverse wave, capillary wave, cats' paws, alpha wave, light wave, microwave, acoustic wave and 314 more...
-
Mirror image words
Words that read the same if they were held in front of the mirror
WOW, MOM, TOOT, TOT, MAM, MA'AM, HAH, OHO, TIT, MUM, VAV, TUT-TUT and 4 more...
-
Words With Initial and Final "w"
Words with an initial and final "w", such as whittaw, williwaw, windlestraw and wow-wow.
whitlow, willow, withdraw, window, widow, workflow, worldview, wallow, wheelbarrow, whew, winnow, whipsaw and 20 more...
-
180 ° words
words that have different meanings that are diametrically opposed to each other: some have changed their meaning to be the complete opposite over the course of time and evolving usage: also could b...
fetch, brook, nice, awful, brave, naughty, bully, amuse, bead, fast, cleave, dry drip and 3 more...
-
gre2
aberrant, aberration, aboveboard, abrasive, abstemious, acme, admonish, affable, affluent, alacrity, allegory, alleviate and 1523 more...
-
GCI
spinster, maiden, happy-go-lucky, homonym, ill-at-ease, saw red, out of sorts, hot under the collar, taken aback, pen-names, alias, shoelaces and 378 more...
-
(more or less) Temporary Urth List
Temporary list is temporary.
Collecting a few words here, which are then to be alloted to other lists.vassal, gnaw, putrescence, liege, pederasty, disseminate, loot, waning, fitful, hiatuse, plow, pious and 292 more...
-
Out of Book Words
commiserate, equanimity, dulcet, cursory, diffident, profligate, egregious, precocious, dissemble, aggregate, efficacy, ingenuous and 100 more...
-
The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
-
kat's words
ecumenical, cacophony, clatter, marimba, bamboo, saffron, slice, mercurial, pomegranate, cranky, slipshod, scritch and 511 more...
-
wunderkammer's Words
smarmy, bubkes, elucidate, togs, aeolian, carp, kibosh, bosky, ramshackle, mange, harpy, effervesce and 163 more...
-
newGRE
mostly from magoosh
imbue, verge on, nonchalant, deliberate, timorous, futile, provisional, dissect, checked, tinged, alluring, visionary and 1046 more...
-
My Revised GRE Preparation List
Words from the new GRE : This list consists mostly of words from the book Magoosh-GRE-vocab-ebook, which is one of the best vocab materials available, especially if you have started preparing one ...
mulct, dupe, pittance, stipend, defray, cupidity, avarice, prodigal, profligate, affluent, insolvent, penurious and 533 more...
-
vorpal's Words
parabiosis, penumbra, defenestrate, portmanteau, sturm und drang, perspicacious, quixotic, copacetic, obfuscate, inveigle, shadenfreude, cloister and 349 more...
-
Vocab++
Words as I learn them.
fetid, mezzanine, hiatus, austerity, subliminal, resplendent, implacable, impugn, debase, exiguous, cirque, holster and 2538 more...
-
Dain's Words
rabble, terminus, archaic, atavism, demiurge, waylay, syzygy, jocoserious, quark, entropy, cinnabar, shamble and 912 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for wallow.

yarb I want a hippopotamus for Christmas -
only a hippopotamus will do -
no crocodiles, or rhinocerouses,
I only like hippopotamuses,
and hippopotamuses like me too! Sep 12, 2009
sionnach Mud! Mud! Glorious mud!
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
So follow me, follow
me down to the hollow
and there we will wallow
in glorious mud!
Ten out of ten hippos agree that*, if you are going to engage in wallowing, then rhapsodic wallowing is the only way to go.
*Agreement on the correct plural of the word 'hippopotamus' was much more elusive, however.
Sep 12, 2009
yarb His voice wallowed rhapsodically.
- Rebecca West, The Judge Sep 12, 2009