Word.ws English Dictionary

wish-washes

wish-washes is the plural of wish-wash.

Meaning of wish-wash

Noun

wish-wash (countable and uncountable, plural wish-washes)

  1. (archaic) Any weak, thin drink.
    • Between the result of the above, and the ordinary wish-wash served as coffee, the difference is too great to be expressed.1926, May Byron, May Clarissa Gillington Byron, Pot-luck, page 395
  2. Talk, music, or art, or ideas that lack any value, substance, originality, or meaning; dreck.
    • It is a thing that fails altogether to interest; a wish-wash that only serves to pass the time.1866, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters to Leipzig Friends, page 121
  3. The sound of liquid sloshing
    • Martha steadily turned and turned, and the cream within the snowy white sycamore box went 'wish-wash, wish-wash, wish-wash, playing, after all, a very delicious tune in the young farmer's ears, for it suggested yellow butter, and yellow butter suggested sovereigns, and sovereigns suggested home...1883 November 17, George Manville Fenn, “The Rosery Folk”, in Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, volume 20, number 1038, page 726

See all 7 meanings of wish-wash

Questions about wish-washes

What is wish-washes the plural of?
Wish-washes is the plural of wish-wash.

Words near wish-washes in the dictionary

  1. wish'd
  2. wish-cycling
  3. wish-fulfilling
  4. wish-wash
  5. wish-washed
  6. wish-washes
  7. wish-washing
  8. Wish.com
  9. wisha
  10. wishable
  11. wishalloy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wish-washes (page history and authors); wish-wash (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: “wish-washes.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wish-washes. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.