American Heritage Dictionary Entry: drench HOW TO USE THE DICTIONARY To look up an entry in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, use the search window above. For best results, after typing in the word, click on the “Search” button instead of using the “enter” key. Some compound words (like bus rapid transit, dog whistle, or identity theft) don’t appear on the drop-down list when you type them in the search bar. For best results with compound words, place a quotation mark before the compound word in the search window. guide to the dictionary THE USAGE PANEL The Usage Panel is a group of nearly 200 prominent scholars, creative writers, journalists, diplomats, and others in occupations requiring mastery of language. Annual surveys have gauged the acceptability of particular usages and grammatical constructions. The Panelists NEED HELP SOLVING A CROSSWORD PUZZLE? Go to our Crossword Puzzle Solver and type in the letters that you know, and the Solver will produce a list of possible solutions. -- AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY APP The new American Heritage Dictionary app is now available for iOS and Android. THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY BLOG The articles in our blog examine new words, revised definitions, interesting images from the fifth edition, discussions of usage, and more. OPEN DICTIONARY PROJECT Share your ideas for new words and new meanings of old words! Start Sharing Now! -- See word lists from the best-selling 100 Words Series! Find out more! INTERESTED IN DICTIONARIES? Check out the Dictionary Society of North America at http://www.dictionarysociety.com drench (drĕnch) Share: Tweet tr.v. drenched, drench·ing, drench·es 1. To wet through and through; soak. 2. To administer a large oral dose of liquid medicine to (an animal). 3. To provide with something in great abundance; surfeit: just drenched in money. n. 1. The act of wetting or becoming wet through and through. 2. Something that drenches: a drench of rain. 3. A large dose of liquid medicine, especially one administered to an animal by pouring down the throat. [Middle English drenchen, to drown, from Old English drencan, to give to drink, drown; see dhreg- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.] drencher n. Word History: Drink and drench mean quite different things today, but in fact they share similar origins, and, historically, similar meanings. Drink comes from a prehistoric Germanic verb *drinkan, from the Germanic root *drink- meaning "drink." Another form of this root, *drank-, could be combined with a suffix *-jan that was used to form causative verbs, in this case *drankjan, "to cause to drink." The descendant of the simple verb *drinkan in Old English was drincan (virtually unchanged), while the causative verb *drankjan was affected by certain sound shifts and became Old English drencan, pronounced (drĕnchŏn), and, in Middle and Modern English, drench. In Middle English drench came to mean "to drown," a sense now obsolete; the sense "to steep, soak in liquid" and the current modern sense "to make thoroughly wet" developed by early Modern English times. Drink and drench are not the only such pairs in English, where one verb comes from a prehistoric Germanic causative; some others include sit and set ("to cause to sit"), lie and lay ("to cause to lie"), and fall and fell ("cause to fall"). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. Indo-European & Semitic Roots Appendices Thousands of entries in the dictionary include etymologies that trace their origins back to reconstructed proto-languages. You can obtain more information about these forms in our online appendices: Indo-European Roots Semitic Roots The Indo-European appendix covers nearly half of the Indo-European roots that have left their mark on English words. A more complete treatment of Indo-European roots and the English words derived from them is available in our Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. 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