soe
/səʊ/
soe noun: a large wooden vessel for carrying water, especially one to be carried on a pole between two people. Also the obsolete form of so.
Noun (1)
soe (plural soes)
- a large wooden vessel for carrying water, especially one to be carried on a pole between two people.
- "[…] no more then a Pump grown dry will yield any water, unless you pour a little water into it first, and then for one Bason-ful you may fetch up so many Soe-fuls".1662, Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheism, Book II, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More, p. 55
Noun (2) capitalized: SOE
SOE (plural SOEs)
- Initialism of state-owned enterprise.
- Having seen post-Soviet state assets fall into the hands of oligarchs, China built up a select group of SOEs with cheap loans, land and energy, so that the wealth would remain with the party.2012, The Economist, Oct 6th 2012 issue, China’s state capitalism: Not just tilting at windmills
Proper noun (1) capitalized: SOE
SOE
- Initialism of Special Operations Executive.
- His luck was that SOE needed people fluent in European languages – a need that soon spawned the creation of an entire commando unit made up of largely Jewish refugees that became known as X-Troop.2021 May 9, Andrew Gumbel, “Raid on Dieppe masked secret mission to steal Nazis’ Enigma machine”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
Proper noun (2) capitalized: Soe
Soe (plural Soes)
- A surname.
Proper noun (3) capitalized: Soe
Soe
- A gewog of Thimphu District, Bhutan.
- The people of Soe Gewog depend largely on yak herding, dairy production, and collection of medicinal plants, particularly cordyceps (Yartsa Gunbu), which is a key source of cash income.n.d., “Soe Gewog”, in Dzongkhag Administration Thimphu, Bhutan, archived from the original on 20 Dec 2025
Also used as
soe is also the obsolete form of so.
Forms of soe
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | soes |
| plural | SOEs |
| Proper noun | |
| plural | Soes |
Origin of soe
From Middle English sō (“large tub, vat”), from Old English sā (“a tub, pail, vessel”) and/or Old Norse sár (“large cask”) (acc. s.sá), both from Proto-Germanic *saihaz (“bucket, vat”), from Proto-Indo-European *seyk- (“to reach, grasp”). Cognate with Swedish så (“large wooden water vessel”).
Borrowed from Burmese စိုး (cui:) and/or Teochew 蘇 /苏 (sou¹) or Hokkien 蘇 /苏 (So͘).
Borrowed from Dzongkha སྲོས་ (sros).
Words that rhyme with soe
Questions about soe
- What does soe mean?
- Soe means a large wooden vessel for carrying water, especially one to be carried on a pole between two people.
- What part of speech is soe?
- Soe can be a noun or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce soe?
- Soe is pronounced /səʊ/.
- What is the plural of soe?
- The plural of soe is soes.
Words near soe in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: soe (page history and authors); SOE (page history and authors); Soe (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:
Cite this entry: “soe.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/soe. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.