Word.ws English Dictionary

wax

UK/waks//wæks/

wax noun: any oily, water-resistant, solid or semisolid substance; normally long-chain hydrocarbons, alcohols or esters.

wax: any oily, water-resistant, solid or semisolid substance; normally long-chain hydrocarbons, alcohols...
Image: Frank Mikley, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

wax (countable and uncountable, plural waxes)

  1. Any oily, water-resistant, solid or semisolid substance; normally long-chain hydrocarbons, alcohols or esters.
  2. (by ellipsis) Beeswax (a wax secreted by bees).
  3. (by ellipsis) Earwax (a wax secreted by the ears).
    • What role does the wax in your earhole fulfill?
    Synonyms:
    cerumen
  4. Any preparation containing wax, used as a polish.
    Synonyms:
    polish
  5. (informal, uncountable) The phonograph record format for music.
    • What really started the corn sprouting on Broadway was a lugubrious tune by Louisiana's Jimmie Davis called It Makes No Difference Now. In the late '30s Decca's Recording Chief David Kapp heard this Texas hit and got it on wax.1943, Time
    Synonyms:
    vinyl, record
  6. (US, dialectal) A thick syrup made by boiling down the sap of the sugar maple and then cooling it.
  7. (US, slang) Any of a class of drugs with weed oil and butane as main ingredients; hash oil.
    • He was charged with two felonies, for possession of Xanax and wax.

Adjective

wax (not comparable)

  1. Made of wax.
    • He looked round the poor room, at the distempered walls, and the bad engravings in meretricious frames, the crinkly paper and wax flowers on the chiffonier; and he thought of a room like Father Bryan's, with panelling, with cut glass, with tulips in silver pots, such a room as he had hoped to have...1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter X, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    waxen

Verb (1)

wax (third-person singular simple present waxes, present participle waxing, simple past and past participle waxed)

  1. (transitive) To coat with wax or a similar material.
    • waxed silk
  2. (intransitive) To form a wax (a thick maple syrup).
    • The syrup is waxing. Come and help yourselves.1932, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods

Verb (2)

wax (third-person singular simple present waxes, present participle waxing, simple past and past participle waxed)

  1. (transitive) To apply wax to (something, such as a shoe, a floor, a car, or an apple), usually to make it shiny.
  2. (transitive) To remove hair at the roots from (a part of the body) by coating the skin with a film of wax that is then pulled away sharply.
  3. (informal, transitive) To defeat utterly.
  4. (slang, transitive) To kill, especially to murder a person.
    • "I was reassigned over from the 9th when the battalion CO got waxed on the road leading in." Ben kept his dismay to himself. Here was one more officer in the 90th who'd been on the job only hours or days, replacing commanders killed or wounded....2005, David L. Robbins, Liberation Road: A Novel of World War II and the Red Ball Express, page 83
    • "You telling me you know who really waxed him and your mom?"
      "Yeah," she lied.
      "Just who pulled the trigger or who ordered it to be pulled?"2009, Dean R. Koontz, Ed Gorman, Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: City of Night, →ISBN, page 106
    Synonyms:
    bump off, knock off, whack, annihilate, bag, baptize, bereave of life, blight, bring down, bury
  5. (archaic, transitive, usually) To record.

Verb (3)

wax (third-person singular simple present waxes, present participle waxing, simple past waxed or (archaic) wex or (obsolete) wox, past participle waxed or (archaic) wex or (obsolete) wox or (dialectal, archaic) waxen)

  1. (intransitive, literary) To greaten.
    • Holonym: wax and wane
    • And then the whole quire hold their hips and laugh,
      And waxen in their mirth and neeze and swear
      A merrier hour was never wasted there.c. 1595–1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, “A Midsommer Nights Dreame”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies (First...
    Antonyms:
    wane
  2. (copulative, intransitive, literary) To increasingly assume the specified characteristic.
    • Near-synonyms: become, get, go, turn, come, fall, grow
    • to wax poetic
    Synonyms:
    become, get, go, turn, come, fall, grow
  3. (intransitive) To appear larger each night as a progression from a new moon to a full moon.
  4. (intransitive) To move from low tide to high tide.

Noun (2)

wax (uncountable)

  1. (rare) The process of growing.

Noun (3)

wax (plural waxes)

  1. (colloquial, dated) An outburst of anger, a loss of temper, a fit of rage.
    • Father Arnall’s face looked very black but he was not in a wax: he was laughing.1916, James Joyce, chapter I, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, N.Y.: B[enjamin] W. Huebsch, →OCLC
    • ‘That's him to a T,’ she would murmur; or, ‘Just wait till he reads this’; or, ‘Ah, won't that put him in a wax!’1970, John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse, New York, published 2007, page 161

Proper noun capitalized: Wax

Wax (plural Waxes)

  1. A surname.

wax meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

wax in Hindi

oily, water-resistant substance
मोम mom

wax in Tamil

மெழுகு

wax in Marathi

oily, water-resistant substance
मेण meṇ

wax in Urdu

oily, water-resistant substance
موم mom
More languagesFewer languages
wax in Bengali
মোম mōm
wax in Telugu
మైనము mainamu, మైనం mainaṁ
wax in Malayalam
മെഴുക് meḻukŭ
wax in Kannada
ಮೇಣ, ಜೇನುಮೇಣ, ಮೇಣದಂತಹ ವಸ್ತು, ಅರಗು
wax in Punjabi
ਮੋਮ mom
wax in Gujarati
મીણ mīṇ
wax in Sanskrit
मक्षिकामल makṣikāmala, सिक्थ siktha
wax in Nepali
मोम गर्न
wax in Arabic
شَمْع šamʕ, شَمَع šamaʕ
wax in Malay
lilin
wax in Indonesian
lilin, malam
wax in Persian
موم mum, واکس vâks, رستن rostan, وخشیدن vaxšidan
wax in Thai
ขี้ผึ้ง kîi-pʉ̂ng
wax in Vietnamese
sáp
wax in Myanmar
ဖယောင်း hpa.yaung:

Examples of wax in a sentence

  • As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit: therefore they are become great, and waxen rich.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Jeremiah 5:27:
  • You behold, Sir, how he waxeth Wroth at your Abode here.1749, Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, volume 2, London: Millar, →OCLC, page 289:
  • The stars grew pale and paler still till at last they vanished; the golden moon waxed wan, and her mountain ridges stood out against her sickly face.1885, H. Rider Haggard, chapter 5, in King Solomon's Mines:
  • In the night, or the gloomy chambers of the day, fears and misgivings wax strong, but out in the sunlight there is, for a time, cessation even of the terror of death.1900, Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie:

All 40 example sentences with wax

Synonyms of wax

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of wax

Forms of wax

Noun
pluralwaxes
Verb
third-person singular presentwaxes
present participlewaxing
past participlewaxed
pastwaxed
past (archaic)wex
past (obsolete)wox
past participle (archaic)wex
past participle (obsolete)wox
past participle (archaic, dialectal)waxen
Proper noun
pluralWaxes

Past tense of wax: waxed

Plural of wax: waxes

Origin of wax

From Middle English wax, from Old English weax, from Proto-Germanic *wahsą, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *woḱ-so-. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Woaks (“wax”), West Frisian waaks (“wax”), Dutch was (“wax”), German Wachs (“wax”), German Low German Wass (“wax”), Luxembourgish Wuess (“wax”), Vilamovian wāhs (“wax”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk voks (“wax”), Faroese vaks (“wax”), Icelandic, Swedish vax (“wax”); and with Lithuanian vaškas (“wax”), Proto-Slavic *voskъ (“wax”).

From Middle English waxen, from the noun (see above).

From Middle English waxen, from Old English weaxan (“to wax, grow, be fruitful, increase, become powerful, flourish”), from Proto-West Germanic *wahsan, from Proto-Germanic *wahsijaną (“to grow”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂weks- (“to grow, increase”). Cognate with Scots wax (“to grow”), West Frisian waakse (“to greaten”), Low German wassen, Dutch wassen (“to greaten”), German wachsen (“to greaten”), Danish and Norwegian vokse (“to greaten”), Swedish växa (“to greaten”), Icelandic vaxa (“to greaten”), Gothic 𐍅𐌰𐌷𐍃𐌾𐌰𐌽 (wahsjan, “to grow”); and with Ancient Greek ἀέξειν (aéxein), Latin auxilium. It is in its turn cognate with augeo. See eke.

Words formed from wax

Phrases with wax

80 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with wax

32 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about wax

What does wax mean?
Wax means any oily, water-resistant, solid or semisolid substance; normally long-chain hydrocarbons, alcohols or esters.
What is wax in Hindi?
Wax in Hindi is मोम (mom). See Wax meaning in Hindi.
How do you use wax in a sentence?
As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit: therefore they are become great, and waxen rich.
What part of speech is wax?
Wax can be a noun, an adjective, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce wax?
Wax is pronounced /waks/ (UK).
What is the plural of wax?
The plural of wax is waxes.

Words near wax in the dictionary

  1. Wawota
  2. Wawrzyniak
  3. Wawrzyniaks
  4. waws
  5. Wawyachtonoc
  6. wax
  7. wax and wane
  8. wax apple
  9. wax apples
  10. wax bean
  11. wax beans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wax (page history and authors); Wax (page history and authors); wax (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); മെഴുക് (Malayalam) (page history and authors); wax (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors); મીણ (Gujarati) (page history and authors); मक्षिकामल (Sanskrit) (page history and authors); wax (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-wax.ogg, en-au-wax.ogg.

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