Word.ws English Dictionary

sourstuff

sourstuff noun: oxygen.

Noun

sourstuff (uncountable)

  1. (rare, puristic or science fiction) Oxygen.
    • This is approximately the heat of exploding what the Germans call bang-gas (mixture of sourstuff and waterstuff), the result being liquid.1887, The Electrical journal, volume 18, page 482
    • For an outshow, the gang of water has two waterstuff unclefts bound to one sourstuff uncleft; the gang of rust has two iron and three sourstuff unclefts; [...]1976, Poul Anderson, Homebrew

Examples of sourstuff in a sentence

  • Thus, everyday sourstuff has eight neitherbits with its eight firstbits, but there are also kinds with five, six, seven, nine, ten, and eleven neitherbits.1997, Poul Anderson, All One Universe, →ISBN:
  • “Best you and your thane don your sourstuff masks now, Judge Scoglund,” Ankowaljuu said, returning to English so Park and Dunedin could not misunderstand him.2013, Harry Turtledove & L. Sprague deCamp, Down in the Bottomlands: And Other Places, →ISBN:

Origin of sourstuff

From sour + stuff. Calque of German Sauerstoff (“oxygen”) and/or Dutch zuurstof (“oxygen”), both loose loan translations of French oxygène. See oxygen for more.

Questions about sourstuff

What does sourstuff mean?
Sourstuff means oxygen.
How do you use sourstuff in a sentence?
Thus, everyday sourstuff has eight neitherbits with its eight firstbits, but there are also kinds with five, six, seven, nine, ten, and eleven neitherbits.
What part of speech is sourstuff?
Sourstuff is a noun.

Words near sourstuff in the dictionary

  1. soursaps
  2. soursob
  3. soursobs
  4. soursop
  5. soursops
  6. sourstuff
  7. sourtop blueberries
  8. sourtop blueberry
  9. sourveld
  10. sourvelds
  11. sourweed

Source and license

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