brush
Pluralbrushes
Verbbrushes, brushing, brushed
Pluralbrushes
Formsbrushes, brushing, brushed
- 1A tool made of flexible bristles or filaments fixed to a handle, used for cleaning, painting, arranging hair, and similar tasks.
The artist cleaned each brush carefully after finishing the portrait.
A wire brush works best for scrubbing rust off metal.
Note
Two ancestors may meet in this word, and the implement takes after the first: Frankish *bursti, from a Germanic word for "bristle". A second candidate, Vulgar Latin *bruscia, goes back to a word for "tuft, thicket, underbrush". That double origin explains why the "undergrowth" meaning sits so naturally beside the bristled tool. The two meanings may not have grown one from the other. They may have arrived from separate roots that merged.
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- 3To clean one's teeth using a toothbrush moved back and forth over them.
The dentist told him to brush more gently along the gumline.
Children should brush after every meal to prevent cavities.
Note
The teeth go unsaid. Nothing else is brushed so routinely, so the bare verb is enough. USA Today (2000) uses it exactly this way, allowing plain chocolate at Halloween "provided you remember to brush afterwards." Use the bare verb in everyday talk about hygiene. For anything else, name the object, as with cleaning with a brush.
- 4To touch something with a light, sweeping motion, or lightly while passing by.
His coat brushed the doorway as he hurried out.
I felt something brush my cheek in the dark.
Similargraze, touch, skim, stroke
Note
Contact so light it barely counts, like a scarf against skin. The verb works with or without an object: something brushes your cheek, or simply brushes past. Milton gives it to sound in Paradise Lost: "Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings." Paul Simon's "Further to Fly" (1990) finds it in the accidental touch of a pickpocket against a thigh.
- 5A single act of moving a brush over something, or a light sweeping touch against it.
With one brush of his sleeve, he wiped the dust off the table.
A few brushes of the comb left her hair smooth.
Similarstroke, sweep, swipe, flick
Note
A single stroke has a favorite construction with give: she gave her hair a quick brush. The noun also stretches to sweeping forces that are not brushes at all. Shakespeare's Timon of Athens has leaves that fall "with one winter's brush," as if the season itself had swept the boughs bare.
- 6Wild vegetation made up of shrubs and low plants, larger than grass but smaller than trees.
Firefighters struggled to contain the blaze spreading through the dry brush.
A rabbit darted out of the brush and across the trail.
Similarscrub, undergrowth, thicket
Note
Undergrowth is where the word's "thicket" ancestor, told under the bristled tool, comes into its own. It is a mass noun: in the brush, through the brush, trees and brush, never a brush. Jack London's Before Adam (1906) has a fleeing tribe caught "in the brush." Edwin Black's Internal Combustion (2006) counts "trees and brush" together as kiln fuel.
- 7A brief or occasional encounter with something, often something risky or unpleasant.
His brush with serious illness changed how he lived.
The hikers had a brush with a bear near the campsite.
Note
Almost always a brush with something, and the phrase that has set hardest is brush with death. The Guardian's 2025 obituary of Pope Francis uses it for the pneumonia that nearly killed him at 21. It counts freely (brushes with communism) and can be wistful as well as grim: Russell Brand describes crowds waiting for "a brush with something glamorous."
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- 9To spread or apply a liquid, such as paint or glaze, onto a surface using a brush.
He brushed a thin layer of varnish onto the tabletop.
Brush the melted butter across the warm rolls.
Note
Watch which noun takes the object slot. Here the object is the substance: you brush paint onto the walls, or butter across the rolls. The surface comes after a preposition such as onto or across. When the surface itself is the object, as in brushing a jacket, the meaning has shifted to cleaning with a brush.
- 10To remove something from a surface by sweeping it away with light, quick strokes.
He brushed the sand from his legs after the swim.
Brush the loose hairs off the jacket before the meeting.
Similarwipe, sweep, dust, flick
Note
The verb of removal pairs naturally with off or from, as in she brushed the flour off my clothes. Shakespeare bends it in The Tempest. There Caliban curses his enemies with dew his mother "brush'd / With raven's feather from unwholesome fen," the sweeping motion gathering something up rather than clearing it away.
- 11The furry tail of an animal, especially the bushy tail of a fox.
The fox's brush flicked as it slipped into the undergrowth.
A squirrel's full brush helps it balance on thin branches.
- 12An on-screen tool used to paint a chosen color or texture onto a digital image.
She selected a wide brush to lay down the background color.
Dragging the brush across the canvas leaves a trail of texture.
Note
Software borrowed the painter's tool along with its verb, so you paint with a brush on screen just as on canvas. Lee Lanier's Maya Professional Tips and Techniques (2007) describes a sprite brush that lays a bitmap image along each painted stroke. Users set its size, hardness and opacity. A saved bundle of such settings is the downloadable preset.
- 13A defined set of design choices and parameters that give drawn strokes a particular texture and quality.
Artists often build a custom brush to match the grain of real watercolor paper.
This brush produces ragged, ink-like strokes with tapered ends.
Note
Here the brush is a file, not a tool. It is a stored recipe of shape, spacing, scattering, texture and dynamics that decides how every stroke looks. That is why artists can download brushes for Photoshop. To tell the two apart: the tool is something you wield on screen, while this kind of brush is something you install and choose.
- 14A drumstick-like implement with fanned wire or plastic bristles, used to draw a soft, brushing sound from drums or cymbals.
She brushed the cymbal lightly, the brush giving the ballad a smoky texture.
Jazz drummers often reach for a brush when the music calls for restraint.
Note
A drummer's tool for quiet: thin strands of wire or nylon fanned out from a handle, then drawn or tapped across drumheads and cymbals. Instead of the sharp attack of a stick, it gives a soft, sustained swish. That is why it is the choice when a ballad calls for restraint.
- 15A component, usually made of carbon, that provides a path for electric current between a machine's rotating and stationary parts.
The technician replaced a worn brush inside the electric motor.
Each brush rides against the commutator, transferring current to the armature.
- 16A brush-shaped electrical discharge in which sparks spread out from a charged point or conductor.
A pale brush of light played around the antenna tip during the storm.
High voltage on the sharp edge produced a faint crackling brush.
Note
This is a sight from early electrical experiments: charge streaming off a sharp point in a visible, glowing fan. Oliver Sacks, in Uncle Tungsten (2001), calls it "a luminous brush, a little corposant," and corposant is the word to pair it with. He also describes the "electric wind" pouring from the point, strong enough to blow out candles or turn a small rotor.
- 17In 3D game design, a convex solid shape used as a building block to define the structure of a play area.
The level designer carved a doorway by subtracting one brush from another.
Every wall in the map began as a simple brush.
Note
Level designers build game worlds out of these blocks. Each one must be convex, with no dents or hollows. A room is therefore never a single shape but an assembly of many, and openings such as doorways are made by subtracting one volume from another in boolean operations.
- 18A tuft of hair on the mandibles of an insect or similar animal.
The beetle's mandibles bore a dense brush of bristles.
A brush of stiff hairs lined the edge of each jaw.
Similartuft
Note
Zoologists use the word for hair arranged like bristles on an animal's jaws. In arthropods the tuft is a dense cluster of setae, the stiff hair-like structures of the body surface. Such mandibular brushes often help handle, filter or gather food. The likeness to the bristled tool is the whole reason for the name.
- 19In a poker room, the staff member who manages waiting lists, seating, and the running of the games, typically in a casino.
The brush called our names when two seats opened at the high-stakes table.
Players checked in with the brush before joining a cash game.
Note
Poker-room slang heard at live games. Players put their names down with the brush and wait to be called to an open seat, and the same person settles disputes at the tables. In writing, or when addressing casino management formally, floorperson is the neutral title. Brush is the word of the players themselves.
- 20A brief race, or any quick trial of speed, as between riders or coaches on the road.
The young officers settled the matter with a brush across the open field.
A brush between the two coaches drew a crowd along the turnpike.
Note
Sporting writers of the nineteenth century used it for a quick dash to see who was faster, often between horses or carriages. Trollope's Framley Parsonage (1860) has Mark and Lord Lufton enjoying "a brush across the country." Today it belongs in historical writing. Keep it apart from the "close encounter" meaning: a brush across country is a race, while a brush with danger is a near miss.
- 21Cut boughs of evergreens, particularly balsam fir, gathered locally and baled for export, mostly to be made into wreaths.
Crews spent November cutting brush in the northern forests.
The mill buys brush by the ton for the holiday wreath trade.
Note
In northern Wisconsin this word names a harvest rather than a tangle. Crews cut evergreen boughs, chiefly balsam, and bale them for shipment, mostly to become wreaths. Outside that region the word would be heard as wild undergrowth, so readers elsewhere need context to see that this brush is a seasonal crop.
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Practice
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Origin
From Middle English brusshe, from Old French broisse (Modern French brosse), from Vulgar Latin *brustia and ultimately a Frankish and Proto-Germanic root *burstiz meaning "bristle"; it may also come from a Proto-Germanic root meaning "tuft, thicket, underbrush."