1 [C] a piece of artificial or natural material that is soft and light and full of holes and can hold water easily, used for washing or cleaning:
a bath sponge (= to wash your body with in the bath) * (figurative) His mind was like a sponge, ready to absorb anything.
2 [U] artificial sponge used for filling furniture, cushions, etc.
3 [C] a simple sea creature with a light body full of holes, from which natural sponge is obtained
4 [C,U] (BrE) = SPONGECAKE:
a chocolate sponge
Part of speech: verb
1 [VN] ~ sb / yourself / sth (down) to wash sb/yourself/sth with a wet cloth or SPONGE:
She sponged his hot face. * Take your jacket off and I'll sponge it down with water.
2 [VN+adv./prep.] to remove sth using a wet cloth or SPONGE:
We tried to sponge the blood off my shirt.
3 [V] ~ (off / on sb) (informal, disapproving) to get money, food, etc. regularly from other people without doing anything for them or offering to pay:
He spent his whole life sponging off his relatives.
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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 sponge is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is sponge a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, sponge is tagged as noun.
Does sponge appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — sponge 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.
