English
wad
Pronunciation Noun

wad (plural wads)

  1. An amorphous, compact mass.
    Our cat loves to play with a small wad of paper.
  2. A substantial pile (normally of money).
    With a wad of cash like that, she should not have been walking round Manhattan
  3. A soft plug or seal, particularly as used between the powder and pellets in a shotgun cartridge, or earlier on the charge of a muzzleloader or cannon.
    Synonyms: prop, valet
  4. (slang) A sandwich.
  5. (slang, vulgar) An ejaculation of semen.
Synonyms Translations Translations Translations Translations Verb

wad (wads, present participle wadding; past and past participle wadded)

  1. To crumple or crush into a compact, amorphous shape or ball.
    She wadded up the scrap of paper and threw it in the trash.
    • 1676, John Evelyn, A Philosophical Discourse of Earth, London: John Martyn, p. 181,
      […] if you lay any fearnbrakes or other trash about them to entertain the moisture, and skreen it from the heat, let it not be wadded so close, or suffer’d to lie so long, as to contract any mustiness, but rather loose and easie, that the Air may have free intercourse, and to break the more intense ardours of the scorching Sun-beams.
    • 1930, Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Chapter 11, p. 122,
      She stood just inside the door, wadding a black-bordered hand-kerchief in her small gloved hands […]
    • 1969, Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman, New York: Popular Library, 1976, Chapter 25, p. 228,
      She wadded Marian into her chair, which was lumpy with garments in progressive stages of dirtiness, and tucked a towel around her neck.
  2. (Ulster) To wager.
  3. To insert or force a wad into.
    to wad a gun
  4. To stuff or line with some soft substance, or wadding, like cotton.
    to wad a cloak
    • 1721, John Midriff, Observations on the Spleen and Vapours, London: J. Roberts, pp. 7-8,
      […] upon his Body were several Flannel Wastcoats, a Cassock of thick Cloth, with a thick wadded Gown, and about his Shoulders the Quilt which he had taken from off the Bed.
    • 1851, Richard Francis Burton, Goa, and the Blue Mountains, London: Richard Bentley, Chapter 1, p. 11,
      Could you believe it possible that through such a night as this they choose to sleep under those wadded cotton coverlets, and dread not instantaneous asphixiation?
    • 1871, George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book 2, Chapter 20,
      If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
Translations Noun

wad

  1. (dialect) Plumbago, graphite.
  2. (mineralogy) Any black manganese oxide or hydroxide mineral rich rock in the oxidized zone of various ore deposits.


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