Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

waterstuff en · NOUN · etymology 1

Compound of water + stuff. Alternative spellings * water-stuff * water stuff

(uncountable) Things containing, associated with, or involving water.
- It was hot, and all the waterstuff came out of Hof's eye, and then he was blind. 2012, Ruth Park, Swords and Crowns and Rings:
- … title and another mag with a tasty bob-haired girl doing the waterstuff all over some poor boy who no doubt deserves it. Will let you know if anything interesting, er, goes down. 2006, Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl
- Any application to the atmosphere of thermodynamics which assumes that waterstuff below 0° C. is ice must necessarily lead the investigator into error. 1911, Sir Napier Shaw, Forecasting Weather - Page viii:
- In the same way as there are not two kinds of stuff, water-stuff and bubble-stuff, but only waterstuff, the absence of which constitutes a bubble, pleasure can be seen as the absence of pain [...] 2010, Jan Westerhoff, Twelve Examples of Illusion - Page 158:

From water + stuff. Calque of Dutch waterstof (“hydrogen”) or German Wasserstoff (“hydrogen”).

(nonstandard, rare, uncountable) Hydrogen.
- This is approximately the heat of exploding what the Germans call bang-gas (mixture of sourstuff and waterstuff), the result being liquid. 1887, Jas. Swinburne, “Theory of Secondary Cells” (letter to the editor), The Electrical Journal, Volume 18, p. 482
- Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. 1997, Poul Anderson, Uncleftish Beholding:
- One day Gröninger, a brilliant young Homoeoid physicist then just at the end of his first year as a graduate student, became convinced that the frequencies of lines in the spectrum of waterstuff are differences between the frequencies … 1989, James Binney, “Stellar Dynamics”, in Immo Appenzeller, Harm Jan Habing, Pierre Léna (eds.), Evolution of galaxies: astronomical observations