Word.ws English Dictionary

shvitz

/ʃvɪts/

shvitz noun: sweat.

Noun

shvitz (countable and uncountable, plural shvitzes)

  1. Sweat.
  2. A traditional Jewish steambath of Eastern European origin.
    • It was not, or not only, the heat and ripeness of the shvitz that were making Litvak’s pulse thrum and his head spin.2007, Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 4th Estate (2010), page 343
  3. (broadly) A sauna or sauna session.
    • “Hey, hey, Jimmy Brogan. Thanks for meeting me.” “Welcome to the schvitz, kid. The most comfortable place on Earth. It's like crawling back into your mother.” “Is that something people wanna do?”2013 November 12, Gabe Liedman, “Old School” (15:48 from the start), in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 1, episode 8, spoken by Jimmy Brogan (Stacy Keach)

Verb

shvitz (third-person singular simple present shvitzes, present participle shvitzing, simple past and past participle shvitzed)

  1. (informal, intransitive) To sweat.
    • Soon, the '80s and '90s guy was finding drums to pound and sweat lodges in which to shvitz out rivulets of shame.2017, David Friend, The Naughty Nineties

Forms of shvitz

Noun
pluralshvitzes
alternative formschvitz
alternative formschwitz
Verb
third-person singular presentshvitzes
present participleshvitzing
past participleshvitzed
pastshvitzed

Origin of shvitz

Borrowed from Yiddish שוויצן (shvitsn), from Old High German swizzen (Modern German schwitzen), from Proto-Germanic *swait- (English sweat), from Proto-Indo-European *swoyd- (“to sweat”). Doublet of sweat.

Words formed from shvitz

Words that rhyme with shvitz

25 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about shvitz

What does shvitz mean?
Shvitz means sweat.
What part of speech is shvitz?
Shvitz can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce shvitz?
Shvitz is pronounced /ʃvɪts/.
What is the plural of shvitz?
The plural of shvitz is shvitzes.

Words near shvitz in the dictionary

  1. Shvat
  2. Shvetambara
  3. shvi
  4. shviger
  5. shvigers
  6. shvitz
  7. shvitzed
  8. shvitzer
  9. shvitzers
  10. shvitzes
  11. shvitzing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shvitz (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)-Vealhurl-shvitz.wav.

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