Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Soft mud or slime.
  • noun A layer of mudlike sediment on the floor of oceans and lakes, composed chiefly of remains of microscopic sea animals.
  • noun Muddy ground.
  • intransitive verb To flow or leak out slowly, as through small openings.
  • intransitive verb To disappear or ebb slowly.
  • intransitive verb To progress slowly but steadily.
  • intransitive verb To exude moisture.
  • intransitive verb To emit a particular essence or quality.
  • intransitive verb To give off; exude.
  • intransitive verb To emit or radiate in abundance.
  • noun The act of oozing.
  • noun Something that oozes.
  • noun An infusion of plant material, as from oak bark, formerly used in tanning.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To flow as ooze; percolate, as a liquid, through the pores of a substance, or through small openings; flow in small quantities from the pores of a body: often used figuratively.
  • To drip; be wet, as with water leaking through.
  • To emit in the shape of moisture; drip.
  • noun The short fibers on the surface of cotton thread, usually burned off in manufacture.
  • noun Soft mud or slime; earth so wet as to flow gently or yield easily to pressure.
  • noun Specifically Fine calcareous mud found covering extensive areas of the floor of the ocean. This deposit is largely made up of the remains of Foraminifera.
  • noun A soft flow; a slow spring; that which oozes.
  • noun In tanning, a solution of tannin obtained by infusing or boiling oak-bark, sumac, catechu, or other tannin-yielding vegetable; the liquor of a tan-vat.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Soft mud or slime; earth so wet as to flow gently, or easily yield to pressure.
  • noun Soft flow; spring.
  • noun The liquor of a tan vat.
  • noun (Oceanography) A soft deposit covering large areas of the ocean bottom, composed largely or mainly of the shells or other hard parts of minute organisms, as Foraminifera, Radiolaria, and diatoms. The radiolarian ooze occurring in many places in very deep water is composed mainly of the siliceous skeletons of radiolarians, calcareous matter being dissolved by the lage percentage of carbon dioxide in the water at these depths.
  • transitive verb To cause to ooze.
  • intransitive verb To flow gently; to percolate, as a liquid through the pores of a substance or through small openings.
  • intransitive verb Fig.: To leak (out) or escape slowly

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Potion of vegetable matter used for leather tanning.
  • noun Secretion, humour.
  • noun A thick often unpleasant liquid; muck.
  • verb intransitive To secrete or slowly leak.
  • verb intransitive, figuratively To give off a sense of (something).
  • noun Soft mud, slime, or shells on the bottom of a body of water.
  • noun Piece of soft, wet, pliable turf.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb release (a liquid) in drops or small quantities
  • verb pass gradually or leak through or as if through small openings
  • noun any thick, viscous matter
  • noun the process of seeping

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From Early Modern English oase, ooze (probably influenced by ooze), from Middle English wose, from Old English wāse; akin to Danish dialectal vejs.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English wosen, from wose, juice, from Old English wōs; akin to Danish dialectal os.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English wose, from Old English wāse 'mud, mire', from Proto-Germanic *waison (compare Dutch waas 'turf, sod', German Wasen, Old Norse veisa 'slime, stagnant pool'), from Proto-Indo-European *weis- 'to flow' (compare Sanskrit veşati 'it dissolves'). More at virus.

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Examples

  • When given the green light, I would pull the boat into the lock, place her along the cement sidewall (a feat with a boat that acts like a bath toy because it has no keel), and grab hold of a weighted line that ran down the side of the lock — slick with ooze from the canal water and sometimes covered with zebra mussels, the scourge of the Great Lakes.

    A Hundred Miles on the Erie Canal 2009

  • Watching your own blood ooze from a cut you made yourself, burning your thigh with a cigarette, vomiting in a restaurant bathroom after a meal, letting yourself look like a derelict -- all the sad and sordid acts associated with "the dark side" -- are in reality little more than pop-culture clichés.

    David Leibow: Can You Catch Cutting and Burning from Your Friends? David Leibow 2010

  • The power went out in our apartment, making a cold puddle of water ooze from the fridge, and because it couldn't be fixed, we were moved to another, almost identical apartment.

    Tenerife day 3 nathreee 2010

  • The danger, as sleazy stories ooze from the depths of the Web, is that traditional news outlets will find themselves spreading unsubstantiated garbage.

    Howard Kurtz finds there are news nuggets in the tough, often tacky blog world Howard Kurtz 2010

  • When given the green light, I would pull the boat into the lock, place her along the cement sidewall (a feat with a boat that acts like a bath toy because it has no keel), and grab hold of a weighted line that ran down the side of the lock — slick with ooze from the canal water and sometimes covered with zebra mussels, the scourge of the Great Lakes.

    A Hundred Miles on the Erie Canal 2009

  • The power went out in our apartment, making a cold puddle of water ooze from the fridge, and because it couldn't be fixed, we were moved to another, almost identical apartment.

    Tenerife day 3 nathreee 2010

  • The smell of what will ooze from the GOP sewer will not be pleasant.

    Palin warns of 'disturbing' health care rationing 2009

  • It's behind a cut, because like everything in Sirenia Digest (subscribe today!), it is, obviously, "mature" and "not work-safe" and likely to offend (or at least confuse) anyone who doesn't think swamp ooze is sexy (I am told such people exist, though I myself doubt it can be true):

    An Old Klingon Proverb greygirlbeast 2008

  • It was Bush who did the "jaw boning" (as he likes to call it) and let what was left of his brain ooze out.

    White House step up criticism of NBC 2008

  • My wife loves watching cheep celeb telly, money; weight and fame generally ooze from the TV.

    EXTRALIFE – By Scott Johnson - Today’s Comic: “People are lame” 2008

Comments

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  • severed pink

    cock of a dog

    oozing goo

    Mutinus caninus

    - Peter Reading, Mycologia, from The Prison Cell and Barrel Mystery, 1976

    June 23, 2008