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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

scorch.

A slight or surface burn.

6 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/skɔːtʃ/Received-Pronunciation/skɔɹt͡ʃ/General-American
  1. A slight or surface burn.

    countable · uncountable
  2. A discolouration caused by heat.

    countable · uncountable
  3. Brown discoloration on the leaves of plants caused by heat, lack of water or by fungi.

    countable · uncountable
Where this word comes from

From Middle English scorchen, scorcnen (“to make dry; parch”), perhaps an alteration of earlier *scorpnen, from Old Norse skorpna (“to shrivel up”).

verb/skɔːtʃ/Received-Pronunciation/skɔɹt͡ʃ/General-American
  1. To burn the surface of something so as to discolour it

    transitive
  2. To wither, parch or destroy something by heat or fire, especially to make land or buildings unusable to an enemy

    transitive
  3. (To cause) to become scorched or singed

    ergative
  4. To move at high speed (so as to leave scorch marks on the ground, physically or figuratively).

    intransitive
  5. To burn; to destroy by, or as by, fire.

  6. To attack with bitter sarcasm or virulence.

    transitive
  7. To ride a bicycle furiously on a public highway.

    colloquial · dated · intransitive
Where this word comes from

From Middle English scorchen, scorcnen (“to make dry; parch”), perhaps an alteration of earlier *scorpnen, from Old Norse skorpna (“to shrivel up”).

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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.