Word.ws English Dictionary

plain water

plain water noun: tap water, either hot or cold, served in restaurants.

Noun

plain water (uncountable)

  1. (Singapore) Tap water, either hot or cold, served in restaurants.
    • Politely I asked for a glass of plain water.1971 June 17, The Straits Times, page 19
    • A visitor from Down Under is wondering why most Singapore restaurants and hotels make it a practice to serve all guests with plain water, even when it has not been asked for.1974 February 21, New Nation: Using Less Water, page 6
  2. (Malaysia) Drinking water

Examples of plain water in a sentence

  • Someone asked for a glass of plain water and was told by the waitress: “That’ll be 60 cents.”1979 October 2, New Nation: Water: Expensive, page 8:
  • Although there is a food and drink stall inside, there are joggers like me who prefer to drink plain water after sweating it out of the tracks.1987 June 13, The Straits Times: Install Water Cooler, page 20:

Questions about plain water

What does plain water mean?
Plain water means tap water, either hot or cold, served in restaurants.
How do you use plain water in a sentence?
Someone asked for a glass of plain water and was told by the waitress: “That’ll be 60 cents.”
What part of speech is plain water?
Plain water is a noun.

Words near plain water in the dictionary

  1. plain text
  2. plain to see
  3. plain truth
  4. plain vanilla
  5. plain view doctrine
  6. plain water
  7. plain weave
  8. plain weaves
  9. plain work
  10. plain wrapper
  11. plain wrappers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plain water (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: “plain water.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/plain_water. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.