# wick

Pronunciation: say "WIK" /wɪk/

## Noun

1. A braid or bundle of fiber, now usually cotton, that draws melted wax, oil or other fuel up to the flame of a candle, lamp or heater; also, the material it is made from.
   - Simple: The string in a candle or lamp that carries the wax or oil up to the flame. Also, this string material.
   - _If the wick is left too long, the candle burns with a tall, sooty flame._
   - _He turned up the wick on the kerosene heater until the cabin grew warm._
3. Any piece of porous material that carries liquid by capillary action; in medicine, a strip of gauze placed in a wound or similar opening to absorb fluids.
   - Simple: Any piece of material that soaks up liquid and carries it along, like a strip of soft cloth put in a wound.
   - _The surgeon left a gauze wick in the abscess so that it could keep draining._
   - _Self-watering pots use a fabric wick to draw water up from a reservoir into the soil._
4. A hamlet or village, or sometimes a town. *(dialectal, England)*
   - Simple: A very small village, or sometimes a town.
5. A slang euphemism for the penis, often in the phrase dip one's wick. *(slang)*
   - Simple: A slang, indirect word for the penis, often heard in the phrase "dip your wick".
   - _On shore leave, half the crew seemed to think of nothing but dipping their wicks._
   - _He climbed out of the icy lake and swore his wick had shrunk to nothing._

## Verb

2. Of a fabric or other porous material, to draw liquid along or away by capillary action (fabrics that wick sweat from the skin); of a liquid, to move through such a material.
   - Simple: To soak up liquid and carry it along, or of a liquid, to spread through cloth or other material this way.
   - _Hikers who sweat heavily should choose fabrics that wick._
   - _The old cotton cord no longer wicks properly, so the lamp keeps going out._

## Noun

6. An enclosed plot of land; a close. *(obsolete, England)*
   - Simple: A piece of land with a fence, hedge or wall all around it.
7. Life, or the quality of being lively. *(obsolete, England, UK, Yorkshire)*
   - Simple: Being alive, or being full of life and energy.

## Other meanings

- (noun) An inlet of water into the land, such as a creek or a small bay.
- (noun) A farm, especially one whose main business is dairying.
- (noun) In bowls or curling, a shot in which the delivered bowl or stone touches a stationary one just enough to change its own direction; a cannon.
- (verb) In bowls or curling, to play a bowl or stone so that it strikes a stationary one just enough to glance off in a new direction; to cannon.
- (noun) Synonym of port: in bowls or curling, a gap among other bowls or stones that a thrown one can just slip through.
- (noun) A basket woven from wickers, the flexible twigs of willow and similar plants; a creel.
- (noun) Wickers taken together, the flexible twigs used for weaving, or the wickerwork made from them.
- (noun) The living base or root part of a plant, where growth goes on, especially a piece of weed root left alive in the soil after careless digging.
- (noun) A maggot.
- (adjective) Alive or living; also, full of life and active.
- (noun) Any angle or corner, most often that of the eye or the mouth.
- (noun) Short for wick-tooth: a canine tooth, one of the pointed teeth between the front teeth and the premolars. Dialectal, chiefly in England.
- (noun) A grove of trees; also, a hollow in the land.

## Origin

**Meanings 1–3, 5** — Old English wēoce ("wick") goes back to Proto-West Germanic *weukā, meaning "wick" or "flax bundle," which may come from the Proto-Indo-European root *weg- ("to weave"), and it became Middle English wek, weke, wicke. Dutch wiek and German Wieche are comparable. Some have suggested that the slang meaning "penis" comes from Hampton Wick, rhyming slang for prick. The verb comes from the noun.
**Meanings 4, 6** — From Middle English wik, wike (“dwelling, home; town; village”), from Old English wīc (“dwelling place, camp, town, village”), probably from Latin vīcus (“street, village”) and/or Proto-West Germanic *wīhs (“village, settlement”), both ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *weyḱ- (“to settle”). It is a doublet of vicus and -wich.
**Meaning 7** — A variant of quick.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/wick (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).