hush
/hʌʃ/
hush verb: to become quiet.
Verb (1)
hush (third-person singular simple present hushes, present participle hushing, simple past and past participle hushed)
- To become quiet.
- To make quiet.
- To appease; to allay; to soothe.
- VVilt thou then / Huſh my Cares thus, and ſhelter me vvith Love?1682, Thomas Otway, Venice Preserv’d, or, A Plot Discover’d. A Tragedy. […], London: […] Jos[eph] Hindmarsh […], →OCLC, Act I, scene i, page 11
- And hush’d my deepest grief of all.1850, [Alfred, Lord Tennyson], “Canto XIX”, in In Memoriam, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 32
Noun (1)
hush (countable and uncountable, plural hushes)
- A silence, especially after some noise.
- It is the hush of night.1816, Lord Byron, “Canto III”, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Canto the Third, London: […] [F]or John Murray, […], →OCLC, stanza LXXXVI
- And there fell a hush upon the gods when they saw that Māna rested, and there was silence on Pegāna save for the drumming of Skarl.1905, Lord Dunsany [i.e., Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany], The Gods of Pegāna, London: [Charles] Elkin Mathews, […], →OCLC
Verb (2)
hush (third-person singular simple present hushes, present participle hushing, simple past and past participle hushed)
- To rush, to gush.
- On the fluir, bluid an punch now hush't leyke a stream, […]1840, Anderson, Ballads, page 96, quoted in the EDD
- […] water, far down below, roaring and hushing over the rocks, […]1867, David M. Moir, The Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith, page 97
- To send forth a rush of water over (some ground) so as to clear off the soil and other materials overlying, and thus uncover or separate out, ore.
- […] worn its Chanel so deep in some Part of its Course as to work upon some mineral Substance, which gives it the Colour of Water hushed from Lead-mines, and is so strong as to tinge the River Derwent […]1750, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (XLVI), page 364
- The earliest method of searching for lead ore was by collecting the water in dams and hushing the surface of the ground where metalliferous veins existed.1886, William Morley Egglestone, Weardale Names, page 73
Noun (2)
hush (plural hushes)
- Water which has been used to clear the soil off of some (area of) rock or ore.
- […] the hush from the lead mines on the moors near that place enters the Arkle, and the stream below suffers materially, the fishing being of little good;1851, Tom Bradley, The Yorkshire Anglers' Guide to the Whole of the Fishing on ..., page 6
- The great cause of the scarcity of fish in this river is without doubt the "hush" coming down from the lead mines in the upper waters. […]1879, Annual Report of the Inspectors of Salmon Fisheries (England and Wales), page 89
- A part of a mine or quarry where ore is to be, or has been, excavated by an artificial flow of water.
- […] lead ore occurs abundantly in the upper crust of the earth, and this phrase would have been quite applicable to the early finds of shoad-stones of lead ore in Weardale, to the importance of which the scars of the "hushes" that still furrow the fell-sides bear conclusive evidence.1917, The Mining Magazine, volume 16, page 19
- After the first hush miners loosened the rock in the floor of the hush with picks and crow bars [...] a torrent of water was sent down which swept and tore the loosened stuff over the grate, trapping much of the ore that was being moved. In this method a hush could be used for over a century and...1965, Arthur Raistrick, A History of Lead Mining in the Pennines, page 159
hush meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Telugu and Malayalam
hush in Tamil
- அமைதி, அமைதிப்படுத்து, ஓசை இன்மை
hush in Urdu
- چپ کرانا, خاموش کرنا, زبان بندی کرنا
hush in Telugu
- hush, hushaby
- జోజో jōjō
hush in Malayalam
- നിശ്ശബ്ദത, ശാന്തത, പ്രശാന്തി
More languagesFewer languages
- hush in Kannada
- ಕುಂಗಿರು, ಸುಮ್ಮಗಿರು, ಗಪ್ಪನಿರು
- hush in Arabic
- صَمَتَ ṣamata, صَمَّتَ ṣammata, أَصْمَتَ ʔaṣmata
Examples of hush in a sentence
- [He] had promised … that he would have a stop put to the hushing process.1887 October 28, North Star, quoted in the NED
- In this method a hush could be used for over a century and could grow […]1965, Arthur Raistrick, A History of Lead Mining in the Pennines, page 159:
Forms of hush
| Verb | |
|---|---|
| third-person singular present | hushes |
| present participle | hushing |
| past participle | hushed |
| past | hushed |
| Noun | |
| plural | hushes |
Origin of hush
From Middle English huschen (“to hush”) (as past participle husht (“silent; hushed”) and interjection husht (“quiet!”)). Cognate with Low German huschen, hüssen (“to hush; lull”), German huschen (“to shoo; scurry”), Danish hysse (“to hush”), and maybe Albanian hesht.
Unclear; possibly onomatopoeic.
Words formed from hush
Phrases with hush
Words that rhyme with hush
Questions about hush
- What does hush mean?
- Hush means to become quiet.
- What is hush in Tamil?
- Hush in Tamil is அமைதி, அமைதிப்படுத்து, ஓசை இன்மை. See Hush meaning in Tamil.
- How do you use hush in a sentence?
- [He] had promised … that he would have a stop put to the hushing process.
- What part of speech is hush?
- Hush can be a verb or a noun.
- How do you pronounce hush?
- Hush is pronounced /hʌʃ/.
- What is the past tense of hush?
- The past tense of hush is hushed.
Words near hush in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: hush (page history and authors); hush (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); hush (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); జోజో (Telugu) (page history and authors); hush (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); hush (Kannada Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-AcpoKrane-hush.wav.
Cite this entry: “hush.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hush. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.