wad
UK/wɒd//wɑd/
wad noun: an amorphous, compact mass.
Noun (1)
wad (plural wads)
- An amorphous, compact mass.
- Our cat loves to play with a small wad of paper.
- My first impulse was to get it[the chewing gum] into my mouth as quickly as possible, but I remembered where I was. I ran home, and on our front porch I examined my loot. The gum looked fresh. I sniffed it and it smelled all right. I licked it and waited for a while. When I did not die I crammed it...1960 July 11, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC
- A substantial pile (normally of money).
- With a wad of cash like that, she should not have been walking round Manhattan.
- The campfires provide enough plain old regular visible light to show this sorry affair for what it is: a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree without merit badges or hygiene. With the IR supered on top of the visible, she can also see vague, spectral red faces out in the shadows where her...1992, Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, page 243
- A soft plug or seal, particularly as used between the powder and pellets in a shotgun cartridge, or earlier on the charge of a muzzleloader or cannon.
- "Bulleted revolver cartridges contain no wad. You are thinking of a shot-gun, sir."1914, Ernest Bramah, Max Carrados
- A sandwich.
- Once we were all sat on the ground, drinking our tea and eating a cheese wad - that was all you could get - I asked where my mate Jackson was. Nobody had any idea but as he was required in the flight office we did a search.2012 January 17, Deborah Lake, Growling Over The Oceans: Avro Shackleton: The Men and the Missions
- An ejaculation of semen.
- All at once, Steven let out a loud gasp, as his cock jerked violently in his hand and sent wad after wad of hot white sperm shooting out all over his chest and stomach.2000, Ian Cappell, The Awakening, London: Prowler Books, →ISBN
- It's a strange thing this yellow liquid, the bodily fluid of a stranger. What was he thinking when he shot his wad? Is he somewhere now wondering about his sperm? Is he at this very moment wondering if a woman somewhere is inseminating with his seed? Well, we are! Here we are in Boston, and we are!2003, Harlyn Aizley, Buying Dad: One Woman's Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor, Los Angeles, Calif.: Alyson Books, →ISBN, page 70
Verb
wad (third-person singular simple present wads, present participle wadding, simple past and past participle wadded)
- To crumple or crush into a compact, amorphous shape or ball.
- She wadded up the scrap of paper and threw it in the trash.
- […] if you lay any fearnbrakes or other trash about them to entertain the moisture, and skreen it from the heat, let it not be wadded so close, or suffer’d to lie so long, as to contract any mustiness, but rather loose and easie, that the Air may have free intercourse, and to break the more intense...1676, John Evelyn, A Philosophical Discourse of Earth, London: John Martyn, page 181
- To wager.
- To insert or force a wad into.
- to wad a gun
- To stuff or line with some soft substance, or wadding, like cotton.
- to wad a cloak
- […] upon his Body were several Flannel Wastcoats, a Cassock of thick Cloth, with a thick wadded Gown, and about his Shoulders the Quilt which he had taken from off the Bed.1721, John Midriff, Observations on the Spleen and Vapours, London: J. Roberts, pages 7–8
Noun (2)
wad (countable and uncountable, plural wads)
- Plumbago, graphite.
- Wad was worth the equivalent of £1,300 a tonne, and some people felt it was worth risking a whipping to smuggle it out.2002, Victoria Finlay, Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox, Sceptre, published 2003, →ISBN, page 96
- Any black manganese oxide or hydroxide mineral rich rock in the oxidized zone of various ore deposits.
Phrase capitalized: WAD
WAD
wad meaning in Urdu, Bengali, Kannada and Odia
wad in Urdu
- واڈ
wad in Bengali
- ওয়াড, ওয়াদ
wad in Kannada
- ವಾಡ್, ವ್ಯಾಡ್
wad in Odia
- ୱାଡ
More languagesFewer languages
- wad in Arabic
- رِزْمَة rizma
- wad in Persian
- دسته daste, مچاله کردن močâle kardan
Examples of wad in a sentence
- These new Knight Visions cost her a big wad of her Mob drug-running money.1992, Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, page 243:
- When a man "blows his wad," at least two different things could have occurred: he either spent or lost all his money in a wager (his wad), or he spent or ejaculated his sperm (his wad).2001, Peter F. Murphy, Studs, Tools, and the Family Jewels: Metaphors Men Live By, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, →ISBN...
- She stood just inside the door, wadding a black-bordered hand-kerchief in her small gloved hands […]1930, Dashiell Hammett, chapter 11, in The Maltese Falcon, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, page 122:
- Mitch wadded the note, and tossed it over the cliff.1957 May, Jim Thompson, Alfred Hitchcock's Suspense Magazine, page 10, column 1:
Synonyms of wad
Forms of wad
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | wads |
| alternative form | wadde |
| alternative form | wadd |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | wads |
| present participle | wadding |
| past participle | wadded |
| past | wadded |
Origin of wad
Probably short for Middle English wadmal (“woolen cloth”), from Old Norse váðmál (“woolen stuff”), from váð (“cloth”) + mál (“measure”). See wadmal. Cognate with Swedish vadd (“wadding, cotton wool”), German Wat, Watte (“wad, padding, cotton wool”), Dutch lijnwaad, gewaad, watten (“cotton wool”), West Frisian waad, Old English wǣd (“garment, clothing”) (English: weed). More at weed, meal.
Words formed from wad
Phrases with wad
- clit wad
- wad hooks
- Wad Madani
- Wad Medani
- blew one's wad
- shot one's wad
- blown one's wad
- blows one's wad
- shoots one's wad
- blowing one's wad
- shooting one's wad
- got one's panties in a wad
3 more phrasesFewer phrases
Words that rhyme with wad
Questions about wad
- What does wad mean?
- Wad means an amorphous, compact mass.
- What is wad in Urdu?
- Wad in Urdu is واڈ. See Wad meaning in Urdu.
- How do you use wad in a sentence?
- These new Knight Visions cost her a big wad of her Mob drug-running money.
- What part of speech is wad?
- Wad can be a noun, a verb or a phrase.
- How do you pronounce wad?
- Wad is pronounced /wɒd/ (UK).
- What is the plural of wad?
- The plural of wad is wads.
Words near wad in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: wad (page history and authors); WAD (page history and authors); wad (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); wad (Bengali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); wad (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); wad (Odia, 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-wad.ogg.
Cite this entry: “wad.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wad. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.