Word.ws English Dictionary

deliquiate

deliquiate verb: to melt and become liquid by absorbing water from the air; to deliquesce.

Verb

deliquiate (third-person singular simple present deliquiates, present participle deliquiating, simple past and past participle deliquiated)

  1. (intransitive) To melt and become liquid by absorbing water from the air; to deliquesce.
    • Its strong taste, its tendency to deliquiate, and indeed all its properties, lead us to think, that it would act powerfully on the animal œconomy […]1790, Antoine-François de Fourcroy, Elements of natural history, and of chemistry
  2. (transitive) To cause to melt.

Adjective

deliquiate (comparative more deliquiate, superlative most deliquiate)

  1. Deeply grooved or channel-like, as the border furrow of a trilobite.
    • In general, however, species of Oncagnostus have deliquiate border furrows in both cephalon and pygidium, have an often long (sag.) and inflated pygidial axis which is broadly rounded posteriorly, and a relatively broader (tr.) glabella.1995, John H Shergold, Osvaldo Bordonaro, Eladio Liñán, “Late Cambrian Agnostoid Trilobites from Argentina”, in Palaeontology, volume 38, page 247

Forms of deliquiate

Verb
third-person singular presentdeliquiates
present participledeliquiating
past participledeliquiated
pastdeliquiated
Adjective
comparativemore deliquiate
superlativemost deliquiate

Origin of deliquiate

First attested in 1668; either from deliquium + -ate (verb-forming suffix) or an alteration of deliquate.

Questions about deliquiate

What does deliquiate mean?
Deliquiate means to melt and become liquid by absorbing water from the air; to deliquesce.
What part of speech is deliquiate?
Deliquiate can be a verb or an adjective.
What is the past tense of deliquiate?
The past tense of deliquiate is deliquiated.

Words near deliquiate in the dictionary

  1. deliquescent
  2. deliquescently
  3. deliquesces
  4. deliquescing
  5. deliquesence
  6. deliquiate
  7. deliquiated
  8. deliquiates
  9. deliquiating
  10. deliquiation
  11. deliquiations

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: deliquiate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “deliquiate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/deliquiate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.