polish.
A substance used to polish.
Meaning & usage
A substance used to polish.
A good silver polish will remove tarnish easily.
Cleanliness; smoothness, shininess.
The floor was waxed to a high polish.
Refinement; cleanliness in performance or presentation.
The lecturer showed a lot of polish at his last talk.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English polishen, from Old French poliss-, stem of some of the conjugated forms of polir, from Latin polīre (“to polish, make smooth”), from Proto-Indo-European *pelh₂- (“to drive, strike, thrust”), from the notion of fulling cloth.
To shine; to make a surface very smooth or shiny by rubbing, cleaning, or grinding.
He polished up the chrome until it gleamed.
To refine; remove imperfections from.
The band has polished its performance since the last concert.
To apply shoe polish to shoes.
To become smooth, as from friction; to receive a gloss; to take a smooth and glossy surface.
Steel polishes well.
To refine; to wear off the rudeness, coarseness, or rusticity of; to make elegant and polite.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English polishen, from Old French poliss-, stem of some of the conjugated forms of polir, from Latin polīre (“to polish, make smooth”), from Proto-Indo-European *pelh₂- (“to drive, strike, thrust”), from the notion of fulling cloth.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.