Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Perspiring freely or profusely.
  • Of or pertaining to the employment of persons, as to make clothes, at the lowest wages.
  • noun The act of perspiring; profuse perspiration; also, the process of producing profuse perspiration by means of sudorifics, hot baths, etc.
  • noun Same as sweating system (which see, under sweating, p. a.).
  • noun The process of producing exudation or oozing of moisture by application of heat either dry or moist.
  • noun Specifically, in tanning, a process of removing hair from hides by exposing them to moist air.
  • noun Specifically, in the tobacco trade, the fermenting, in either the active or passive sense, of tobacco leaves, a process which follows that of curing or drying, and consists of further evaporation with chemical changes due, as shown by Loew, to the activity of two oxidizing enzymes.
  • noun In the refining of paraffin from petroleum or bituminous shale, a process of fractional fusion in which the crude paraffin-scale in blocks is placed in a chamber heated by steam-pipes to a temperature a few degrees below the point at which the whole would melt, the more fusible part drained away, and the still solid portion afterward melted down at a higher temperature and decolorized by means of animal charcoal.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • a. & n. from sweat, v.
  • a bath producing sensible sweat; a stove or sudatory.
  • a house for sweating persons in sickness.
  • a kind of knife, or a piece of iron, used to scrape off sweat, especially from horses; a horse scraper.
  • (Dairying) A room for sweating cheese and carrying off the superfluous juices.
  • (Med.) a febrile epidemic disease which prevailed in some countries of Europe, but particularly in England, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, characterized by profuse sweating. Death often occured in a few hours.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun the production and evaporation of a watery fluid called sweat that is excreted by the sweat glands in the skin of mammals.
  • verb Present participle of sweat.
  • adjective of or relating to one who is sweating

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the process of the sweat glands of the skin secreting a salty fluid

Etymologies

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Examples

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  • "A mode of diminishing the gold coin, practised chiefly by Jews, who corrode it with aqua regia. Sweating was also a diversion practised by the bloods of the last century, who styled themselves Mohocks: these gentlemen lay in wait to surprise some person late at night, when surrounding him, they with their swords pricked him in the posteriors, which obliged him to be constantly turning around; this they continued until they thought him sufficiently sweated."

    - Francis Grose, 'The Vulgar Tongue'.

    September 11, 2008

  • I think I can believe this was not listed.

    September 11, 2008