Word.ws English Dictionary

mist

/mɪst/

mist noun: water or other liquid finely suspended in air. (Compare fog, haze.). Also the past of miss.

Noun

mist (countable and uncountable, plural mists)

  1. Water or other liquid finely suspended in air. (Compare fog, haze.)
    • It was difficult to see through the morning mist.
    Synonyms:
    brume
  2. (countable) A layer of fine droplets or particles.
    • There was an oily mist on the lens.
  3. (figuratively) Anything that dims, darkens, or hinders vision.
    • His passion cast a mist before his sense.1700, [John] Dryden, “Palamon and Arcite: Or, The Knight’s Tale. In Three Books.”, in Fables Ancient and Modern; […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC
    • Alas, I do not have the strength to continue writing. Already, mist veils my eyes.2004, Intelligent Systems, translated by Nintendo of America, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Nintendo, GameCube, level/area: Hooktail Castle

Verb (1)

mist (third-person singular simple present mists, present participle misting, simple past and past participle misted)

  1. (intransitive) To form mist.
    • It's misting this morning.
  2. (transitive) To spray fine droplets on, particularly of water.
    • I mist my tropical plants every morning.
  3. (intransitive) To rain in very fine droplets.
    • ... it's misting outside. When it mists outside it's half fog and half rain.1996, Don McCabe, Word Families in Sentence Context, AVKO Foundation, →ISBN, page 235
    • On this particular early morning , with a bitter cold rain misting down, Seminov was reaching the end of his endurance.2013 April 2, Don Pendleton, Nuclear Intent, Gold Eagle, →ISBN, page 238
  4. (transitive) To cover with a mist.
    • The lens was misted.
    • her breath will mist or staine the stonec. 1603–1606, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of King Lear”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
  5. (transitive) To be covered by tears.
    • My eyes misted when I remembered what had happened.
  6. To disperse into a mist, accompanying operation of equipment at high speeds.

Proper noun capitalized: MIST

MIST

  1. (abbreviation, acronym) Acronym of Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey.

Verb (2) capitalized: MiST

MiST (third-person singular simple present MiSTs, present participle MiSTing, simple past and past participle MiSTed)

  1. (alternative) Alternative form of MST (to mock a work by inserting annotations)

Also used as

mist is also the past of miss.

mist meaning in Hindi, Malayalam, Sanskrit and Tagalog

mist in Hindi

water or other liquid finely suspended in air
धुंध dhundh, कोहरा kohrā

mist in Malayalam

water or other liquid finely suspended in air
മഞ്ഞ് maññŭ

mist in Sanskrit

water or other liquid finely suspended in air
नभस् nabhas

mist in Tagalog

water or other liquid finely suspended in air
ulop
More languagesFewer languages
mist in Arabic
سَدِيم sadīm
mist in Malay
kabus, halimun
mist in Indonesian
pedut, kabus, halimun
mist in Persian
مه تنک meh-e tonok, میغ miġ
Kashmiri
وُنَل vunal

Examples of mist in a sentence

  • The clouds and mist were soon enough dispelled by the sun.
  • What was that tackle about? The red mist still descends on Beckham occasionally.
  • The bathroom mirror misted up when he opened the shower door.

All 40 example sentences with mist

Synonyms of mist

Forms of mist

Noun
pluralmists
Verb
third-person singular presentmists
present participlemisting
past participlemisted
pastmisted
third-person singular presentMiSTs
present participleMiSTing
past participleMiSTed
pastMiSTed

Plural of mist: mists

Origin of mist

The noun is from Middle English mist, from Old English mist (“mist; darkness; dimness (of eyesight)”), from Proto-Germanic *mihstaz (“mist, fog”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₃migʰstos, from the root *h₃meygʰ- (“cloud, fog, drizzle”). Cognate with Scots mist (“mist, fog”), West Frisian mist (“mist”), Dutch mist (“mist”), Swedish mist (“mist, fog”), Icelandic mistur (“mist”), West Frisian miegelje (“to drizzle”), Dutch dialectal miggelen, miegelen (“to drizzle”), Lithuanian miglà (“fog”), Sanskrit मेघ (megha, “cloud”), Russian мгла (mgla, “fog, haze”). The verb is from Middle English misten, from Old English mistian.

Words formed from mist

Phrases with mist

Words that rhyme with mist

43 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about mist

What does mist mean?
Mist means water or other liquid finely suspended in air. (Compare fog, haze.).
What is mist in Hindi?
Mist in Hindi is धुंध (dhundh), कोहरा (kohrā). See Mist meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is mist?
Mist can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce mist?
Mist is pronounced /mɪst/.
What is the plural of mist?
The plural of mist is mists.

Words near mist in the dictionary

  1. missynchronizing
  2. missynthesize
  3. missynthesized
  4. missynthesizes
  5. missynthesizing
  6. mist
  7. mist belt
  8. mist belts
  9. mist cap
  10. mist caps
  11. mist coat

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mist (page history and authors); MIST (page history and authors); MiST (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-mist.ogg.

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