wallow
Americanverb (used without object)
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to roll about or lie in water, snow, mud, dust, or the like, as for refreshment.
Goats wallowed in the dust.
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to live self-indulgently; luxuriate; revel.
to wallow in luxury; to wallow in sentimentality.
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to flounder about; move along or proceed clumsily or with difficulty.
A gunboat wallowed toward port.
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to surge up or billow forth, as smoke or heat.
Waves of black smoke wallowed into the room.
noun
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an act or instance of wallowing.
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a place in which animals wallow.
hog wallow; an elephant wallow.
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the indentation produced by animals wallowing.
a series of wallows across the farmyard.
verb
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(esp of certain animals) to roll about in mud, water, etc, for pleasure
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to move about with difficulty
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to indulge oneself in possessions, emotion, etc
to wallow in self-pity
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(of smoke, waves, etc) to billow
noun
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the act or an instance of wallowing
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a muddy place or depression where animals wallow
Other Word Forms
- wallower noun
Etymology
Origin of wallow
before 900; Middle English walwe, Old English wealwian to roll; cognate with Gothic walwjan; akin to Latin volvere
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Having lost their World Cup play-off semi-finals against Bosnia-Herzegovina and Italy respectively five days earlier, given the choice, Wales and Northern Ireland would probably have had the night off to wallow.
From BBC
“And it’s going to, for a long while. But day by day, step by step, we’ll carry on. She wouldn’t want us to wallow. She’d want us to live and be happy.”
From Literature
A published poet, Cummins writes daily, and as he describes it, that means he is sometimes “wallowing in nostalgia” or “angsting over the future.”
From Los Angeles Times
This is the kind of art that would find a suitable home in a crypto king’s Miami mansion, and whose pretense of depth can’t conceal its wallowing in the shallows.
They’d spend their days at leisure in the hog wallow and nest in dry leaves by night.
From Literature
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
