1 [U,C] a substance used when rubbing a surface to make it smooth and shiny:
furniture / floor / shoe / silver polish * wax polish
seealsoFRENCHPOLISH, NAILPOLISH
2 [sing.] an act of polishing sth:
I give it a polish now and again.
3 [sing.] the shiny appearance of sth after it has been polished
4 [U] a high quality of performance achieved with great skill:
She played the cello with the polish of a much older musician.
5 [U] high standards of behaviour; being polite:
She thought that her husband's family lacked polish.
IDIOMS see SPITn.
Part of speech: verb
1 ~ sth (up) (with sth) to make sth smooth and shiny by rubbing it with a piece of fabric, often with polish on it:
[VN] Polish shoes regularly to protect the leather. * He polished his glasses with a handkerchief. * She polished the apple on her sleeve. [also V]
seealsoFRENCHPOLISH
2 [VN] ~ sth (up) to make changes to sth in order to improve it:
The statement was carefully polished and checked before release. * The hotel has polished up its act (= improved its service) since last year.
PHRASALVERBS
polish sb<->off (informal, especially AmE) to kill sb
polish sth<->off (informal) to finish sth, especially food, quickly:
He polished off the remains of the apple pie.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for polish is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is polish a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, polish is tagged as noun.
Does polish appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — polish appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
