soaking

soaking is the present participle and gerund of soak.

Noun

soaking (countable and uncountable, plural soakings)

Immersion in water; a drenching or dunking.
- "We came on a wild-goose chase", grumbled one, as he stirred the fire. "Got nothing but a soaking for our pains".1906, Horatio Alger, chapter 2, in Joe the Hotel Boy, archived from the original on 11 Aug 2014
The practice of inserting a penis into a vagina and remaining stationary, without thrusting, supposedly used by Mormons in lieu of traditional sexual intercourse.
- That's probably why everyone is already having anal sex in ninth grade. I mean, let's face it, even the Mormons are soaking.2017, Carrie Keagan, Dibs Baer, Everybody Curses, I Swear!: Uncensored Tales from the Hollywood Trenches, Macmillan, →ISBN, page 240
- Mormonism is a culture very much predicated on puritanical commitments[…]the Amazon series Alpha House[…]made much of Mormon soaking, an alternative sex practice engaged in by two LDS characters on the show. Soaking basically allows for penis-vagina penetration but absolutely no friction. Insertion...2019, Brenda R. Weber, Latter-day Screens: Gender, Sexuality, and Mediated Mormonism, Duke University Press, →ISBN

soaking (comparative more soaking, superlative most soaking)

Extremely wet; saturated.
- I shuddered as I stood and looked round me: it was an inclement day for outdoor exercise; not positively rainy, but darkened by a drizzling yellow fog; all under foot was still soaking wet with the floods of yesterday.1847, Charlotte Bronte, chapter 5, in Jane Eyre, archived from the original on 11 Aug 2014
Of rain, heavy but slow enough to penetrate deeply into the top soil.

soak (third-person singular simple present soaks, present participle soaking, simple past and past participle soaked)

(intransitive) To be saturated with liquid by being immersed in it.
- I'm going to soak in the bath for a couple of hours.
(transitive) To immerse in liquid to the point of saturation or thorough permeation.
- Soak the beans overnight before cooking.
(intransitive) To penetrate or permeate by saturation.
- The water soaked into my shoes and gave me wet feet.
Synonyms:

imbue
(transitive) To allow (especially a liquid) to be absorbed; to take in, receive. (usually + up)
- A sponge soaks up water; the skin soaks in moisture.
(figuratively, transitive) To overcharge or swindle out of a large amount of money.
- It's a blackmail ring, and the district attorneys get a share of the loot. […] Well, they got him in the same kind of jam, and soaked him to the tune of three hundred and eighty-six thousand.1928, Upton Sinclair, Boston, New York, N.Y.: Albert & Charles Boni, page 337
Synonyms:

fleece
(dated, slang) To drink intemperately or gluttonously.

Inherited from Middle English soukynge. By surface analysis, soak + -ing. First attested in c. 1440 in the Promptorium parvulorum.

What does soaking mean?: Soaking means immersion in water; a drenching or dunking.
What is soaking the present participle and gerund of?: Soaking is the present participle and gerund of soak.
What part of speech is soaking?: Soaking can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of soaking?: The plural of soaking is soakings.

Adapted from Wiktionary: soaking (page history and authors); soak (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: 2026-09-02

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