Word.ws English Dictionary

vat

/væt/

vat noun: a large tub, such as is used for making wine or for tanning.

Noun (1)

vat (plural vats)

  1. A large tub, such as is used for making wine or for tanning.
    • a vat of liquid
    • a vat of acid
  2. A square, hollow place on the back of a calcining furnace, where tin ore is laid to dry.
  3. A vessel for holding holy water.
  4. (dated) A liquid measure and dry measure; especially, a liquid measure in Belgium and Holland, corresponding to the hectolitre of the metric system, which contains 22.01 imperial gallons, or 26.4 standard gallons in the United States.

Verb

vat (third-person singular simple present vats, present participle vatting, simple past and past participle vatted)

  1. (transitive) To put into a vat.
  2. (transitive) To blend (wines or spirits) in a vat; figuratively, to mix or blend elements as if with wines or spirits.
    • He was thinking of the grape arbor in Kingston, of summer twilight and the murmur of voices darkening into silence as he approached, who meant them, her, no harm; who meant her less than harm, good God; darkening into the pale whisper of her white dress, of the delicate and urgent mammalian whisper...1931, William Faulkner, Sanctuary, Library of America, published 1985, page 114

Adjective

vat (not comparable)

  1. Designating a vat dye.
    • vat red
    • vat jade green

Noun (2) capitalized: VAT

VAT (uncountable)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of value added tax.
    • And neither party is up for imposing a VAT in place of the current income tax system.2024 December 28, Jonathan Nicholson, “Yes, There Are Ways To Cut The Budget Deficit. 'DOGE' Hasn’t Found Them So Far.”, in HuffPost
    Synonyms:
    GST
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of vigilance awareness training.

vat meaning in Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada and Gujarati

vat in Bengali

ভ্যাট

vat in Malayalam

വാറ്റ്

vat in Kannada

ವ್ಯಾಟ್

vat in Gujarati

વેટ
More languagesFewer languages
vat in Odia
ଭାଟ୍
vat in Nepali
भ्याट गर्न
vat in Persian
خم xom, خمبه xombe, خمره xomre

Examples of vat in a sentence

  • Wool was dyed in the pastel vat.
  • There's a Costco-sized vat of hair clay to keep his hair mussed just so, no matter the constant rain.
  • Does that seem an overharsh judgment on a life spent ordering supersize cokes, buckets of fries and vats of gelato?

All 15 example sentences with vat

Synonyms of vat

Forms of vat

Noun
pluralvats
Verb
third-person singular presentvats
present participlevatting
past participlevatted
pastvatted

Plural of vat: vats

Origin of vat

Inherited from Middle English vat, a dialectal variant of fat (“vat, vessel, cask”), from Old English fæt (“vat, vessel”), from Proto-West Germanic *fat, from Proto-Germanic *fatą (“vessel”), from Proto-Indo-European *pod- (“vessel”). Cognate with Scots fat, vat, vautt (“vat, cask, tub”), West Frisian fet, Dutch vat (“barrel, cask, vessel, vat”), German Fass (“barrel, keg, drum, cask, vat”), Danish fad (“saucer, dish”), Swedish fat (“dish, barrel, cask, vat”), Icelandic fat (“dish, saucer”). See Etymology 3 of fat.

Words formed from vat

Phrases with vat

Words that rhyme with vat

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about vat

What does vat mean?
Vat means a large tub, such as is used for making wine or for tanning.
What is vat in Bengali?
Vat in Bengali is ভ্যাট. See Vat meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is vat?
Vat can be a noun, a verb or an adjective.
How do you pronounce vat?
Vat is pronounced /væt/.
What is the plural of vat?
The plural of vat is vats.

Words near vat in the dictionary

  1. Vasyl
  2. Vasylivka
  3. Vasylkiv
  4. Vasylovych
  5. Vasyugan
  6. vat
  7. vat dye
  8. vat dyes
  9. vat jade green
  10. vat jade greens
  11. vata

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: vat (page history and authors); VAT (page history and authors); vat (Bengali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); vat (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); vat (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); vat (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); vat (Odia, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); vat (Nepali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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: en-us-vat.ogg, LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-VAT.wav.

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