waterstuff

English

Etymology 1

From water + stuff.

Alternative forms

  • water-stuff, water stuff

Noun

waterstuff (uncountable)

  1. Things containing, associated with, or involving water.
    • 1911, Sir Napier Shaw, Forecasting Weather - Page viii:
      Any application to the atmosphere of thermodynamics which assumes that waterstuff below 0° C. is ice must necessarily lead the investigator into error.
    • 2006, Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl:
      [...] 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.
    • 2010, Jan Westerhoff, Twelve Examples of Illusion - Page 158:
      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 [...]
    • 2012, Ruth Park, Swords and Crowns and Rings:
      It was hot, and all the waterstuff came out of Hof's eye, and then he was blind.

Etymology 2

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

Noun

waterstuff (uncountable)

  1. (chemistry, nonstandard, rare) Hydrogen.
    • 1887, Jas. Swinburne, “Theory of Secondary Cells” (letter to the editor), The Electrical Journal, Volume 18, p. 482:
      This is approximately the heat of exploding what the Germans call bang-gas (mixture of sourstuff and waterstuff), the result being liquid.
    • 1989, James Binney, “Stellar Dynamics”, in Immo Appenzeller, Harm Jan Habing, Pierre Léna (eds.), Evolution of galaxies: astronomical observations:
      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 [...]
    • 1997, Poul Anderson, “Uncleftish Beholding”:
      Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest.
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