pollution
- 1The contamination of the environment by harmful substances, or by disruptive levels of noise, light, and similar disturbances.
Decades of industrial pollution left the harbor unsafe for fishing.
Light pollution from the city makes it hard to see the stars.
Similarcontamination
Note
The environmental meaning is the newest layer of an old word. Latin pollūtiō meant "defilement, desecration," and English kept that charge, as in the sacred sense, long before the word settled on the air and water. It is usually uncountable and readily takes a modifier naming the medium or the nuisance: air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution, light pollution. It also pairs naturally with measurement, as in pollution levels.
- 2A substance or agent that pollutes; matter that contaminates its surroundings.
The pollution drifting from the smokestack coated nearby rooftops in soot.
Engineers tracked the pollution back to a single leaking pipe.
Similarcontamination
- 3Moral or spiritual corruption; impurity, degradation, or defilement of character.
The novel traces the slow pollution of an idealist's conscience by power.
Corruption at the top spread its pollution through every level of the court.
Similarcorruption, defilement, taint, degradation
Note
The figurative sense taints character or standing rather than air or altar. Jane Austen gives it a social edge in Pride and Prejudice (1813), where Pemberley's very woods are said to have "received" pollution. The place is stained by a presence, not by any substance. Unlike the sacred sense, it carries no archaic flavor and still sits comfortably in figurative prose about conscience, institutions and reputations.
Less common meanings
- 4The desecration of something holy or sacred; defilement or profanation of what is consecrated.
The chronicle records the pollution of the cathedral when troops stabled horses in the nave.
[T]he most gallant knights that ever wielded sword wasted their lives away in a struggle to seize it and hold it sacred from infidel pollution.
1869, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], The Innocents AbroadNote
This is the sense closest to the Latin root behind the environmental meaning: what is fouled here is holy ground. Milton has priestly strife bring pollution "upon the Temple" in Paradise Lost (1667). Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad (1869) still has knights keeping a shrine "sacred from infidel pollution." Today it reads as archaic. In plain modern prose, desecration or profanation is the safer word unless that elevated tone is wanted.
- 5The emission of semen outside of sexual intercourse, especially an involuntary discharge during sleep.
The penitent recorded each pollution in his diary as a moral failing.
Monastic rules prescribed prayers after an involuntary pollution during the night.
Note
A word shared by the old medical dictionary and the confessional. Robley Dunglison's Medical Lexicon (1839) files nocturnal pollution beside Greek terms such as exoneirosis. Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1927) reports theologians weighing when pollution in sleep becomes sin. That moral judgment is built into the word, which is why it is now archaic. Modern writing says nocturnal emission instead.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English pollucioun ("desecration, impurity"), by way of Anglo-Norman and Middle French, from post-classical Latin pollūtiō ("defilement, desecration"). This comes from the verb polluō ("to soil, defile, contaminate"), formed from por- ("before") and -luō ("to smear"), and related to lutum ("mud") and luēs ("filth").