wet – English adjective declension

Adjective: wet

Comparison Forms

Synthetic

Comparative	wetter
Superlative	wettest

Perifrastic

Sample Sentences

Water is wet.
I went out in the rain and now my clothes are all wet.
The baby is wet and needs its nappy changed.
Parents and small children can stay cool and soaking wet at interactive water playgrounds. [2013 July 31, Thom Patterson, “How to get soaking wet this summer”, in CNN:]
A chimichanga (MWCD: 1982) is a burrito that is deep-fried, rather than baked, and is served in the fashion of a wet burrito. [2000, Robert Allen Palmatier, Food: a dictionary of literal and nonliteral terms, page 372]
The new item is its first "wet," or sauce-topped, burrito. [2005, Restaurant business, Volume 104, Issues 1-10]
But I'm getting the wet burrito.” Ignacio looked down at some sort of a tomato sauce–covered tortilla tube. [2011, J. Gabriel Gates, Charlene Keel, Dark Territory, page 13]
This pen’s a wet writer, so it’ll feather on this cheap paper.
It’s going to be wet tomorrow.
1637, John Milton, Comus, London: Humphrey Robinson, p. 32,
Summer drouth, or singed aire
Never scorch thy tresses faire,
Nor wet Octobers torrent flood
Thy molten crystall fill with mudde,
“Everybody is interested in extremes – the hottest, the wettest, the windiest – so creating a database of professionally verified records is useful in that fact alone,” says Randall Cerveny from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). [2017 June 15, Hiufu Wong, “11 extreme weather records”, in CNN:]
February 2020 was officially the wettest February on record for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the second wettest (behind 1990) for Scotland. [2020 May 20, Paul Stephen, “NR beats floods to secure tracks to Drax”, in Rail, page 58:]
While the study doesn’t directly shed light on why, it suggested that maintaining a similar degree of mobility as the climate changed to the warmer and wetter pattern we have today could have imparted additional stress as the mammoth encountered unfamiliar environments or restricted its movement. [2021 August 12, Katie Hunt, “Mammoths were the original ‘ice road truckers,’ traveling vast distances across the Arctic”, in CNN:]
This fighter jet's engine is rated for a maximum wet thrust of 450 kilonewtons, more than twice its max dry thrust, but the afterburner eats up a huge amount of fuel.
That guy’s wet; after all, he just started yesterday.
He got me all wet.
I'm gonna get you wet. I'm gonna get you very wet. I know how to do this. [1980, Paul Schrader, American Gigolo, spoken by Julian Kaye (Richard Gere):]
"Wet! What currency that bit of slang has—and what awful power. It took me a long time to find out what the word meant, but after long research I think that I know. A man is wet if he isn't a 'regular guy'; he is wet if he isn't 'smooth'; he is wet if he has intellectual interests and lets the mob discover them; and, strangely enough, he is wet by the same token if he is utterly stupid. He is wet if he doesn't show at least a tendency to dissipate, but he isn't wet if he dissipates to excess. A man will be branded as wet for any of these reasons, and once he is so branded, he might as well leave college … " [1924, Percy Marks, chapter XVII, in The Plastic Age:]
I think it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions, and about our culture, and we stopped this general fight of self-recrimination and wetness. [2020, Boris Johnson quoted in "Proms row: Johnson calls for end to 'cringing embarrassment' over UK history," by Jim Waterson, The Guardian, Aug. 25, 2020]
Don’t be so wet.
The wet states would be "the greatest beneficiaries" because the amendment would root out the liquor traffic within their cities. [1995, Richard F. Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment:]
c. 1694, Matthew Prior, “Celia to Damon”
[…] When my lost Lover the tall Ship ascends, / With Musick gay, and wet with Iovial Friends […]
the wet extraction of copper, in distinction from dry extraction in which dry heat or fusion is employed
a wet affair; a wet job; wet stuff
1811. John Adams, Letter to the Boston Patriot, §25. Reprinted in 1856. Charles Francis Adams (ed.), The Life of John Adams, Second President of The United States. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, p. 661.
The Catholics thought him almost a Catholic. The Church of England claimed him as one of them. The Presbyterians thought him half a Presbyterian, and the Friends believed him a wet Quaker. The dissenting clergymen in England and America were among the most distinguished asserters and propagators of his renown. Indeed, all sects considered him, and I believe justly, a friend to unlimited toleration in matters of religion.

Adjectives inflected like wet

WET, fat, fit, hot, wet, squat, flat, phat,

Etymology

1. From Middle English wet (“wet, moistened”), wett, wette, past participle of Middle English weten (“to wet”), from Old English wǣtan (“to wet, moisten, water”), from Proto-West Germanic *wātijan, from Proto-Germanic *wētijaną (“to wet, make wet”), from Proto-Indo-European *wed- (“water, wet”) (also the source of water).
2. Cognate with Scots weit, wete (“to wet”), Saterland Frisian wäitje (“to wet; drench”), Icelandic væta (“to wet”). Compare also Middle English weet (“wet”), from Old English wǣt (“wet, moist, rainy”), from Proto-West Germanic *wāt, from Proto-Germanic *wētaz (“wet, moist”), related to Scots weit, weet, wat (“wet”), North Frisian wiat, weet, wäit (“wet”), Saterland Frisian wäit (“wet”), West Frisian wiet (“wet”), Middle Dutch wet (“wet, damp, watery”), Swedish and Norwegian våt (“wet”), Danish våd (“wet”), Faroese vátur (“wet”), Icelandic votur (“wet”).