irrigation

American  

[ir-i-gey-shuhn] / ˌɪr ɪˈgeɪ ʃən /

noun

• irrigations
  plural

1. the artificial application of water to land to assist in the production of crops.

2. Medicine/Medical. the flushing or washing out of anything with water or other liquid.

3. the state of being irrigated.

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irrigation Cultural  

1. Artificial provision of water to sustain growing plants.

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Irrigation accounts for the greatest part of water usage in the western United States.

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• nonirrigation
  noun
• overirrigation
  noun
• preirrigation
  noun
• reirrigation
  noun
• irrigational
  adjective
• preirrigational
  adjective
• proirrigation
  adjective

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• irrigations
  plural

Etymology

Origin of irrigation

First recorded in 1605–15, irrigation is from the Latin word irrigātiōn- (stem of irrigātiō ). See irrigate, -ion

Explanation

Irrigation is the watering of land to make it ready for agriculture. If you want to start a strawberry farm in the desert, irrigation will be necessary. Irrigation comes from the Latin for "moist" or "wet," but it means the purposeful wetting of something. We wouldn’t really say that a storm provides irrigation (unless we were poetically trying to personify the storm). Irrigation systems are often complex combinations of canals, channels, and hoses. The word irrigation is also used in medicine to describe the process of washing out a wound before dressing it.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

irrigation irrigations

At the same time, human withdrawals of groundwater have become an increasingly significant source of depletion, particularly in downstream agricultural regions that rely heavily on irrigation.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 20, 2026

Options include “more efficient irrigation, less water-intensive crops and short-term fallowing of fields,” according to Michael Cohen, a senior fellow at the Pacific Institute.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 16, 2026

Though not immediately visible to the naked eye, the ranch features a number of infrastructural updates, including automated irrigation and a fire suppression system that runs off an 18,000-gallon tank buried underground.

From MarketWatch ● Aug. 12, 2026

Many farmers will either have to accept more waste, invest in better irrigation and water storage systems, or find a way to sell more wonky produce to consumers.

From BBC ● Aug. 11, 2026

We’ve even dug some irrigation ditches, in case there’s a drought.

From "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" by Robert C. O'Brien

"I can go online and see what irrigations are needed down in Santa Barbara, 300 miles away," says Mr Maraden, who is based in Napa, north west of San Francisco.

From BBC ● Apr. 17, 2024

To do it, the country had to build massive irrigations systems and will use up to 800 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of water.

From Seattle Times ● Feb. 3, 2022

“If you took all the people who say they have chronic sinusitis in the world, and you put them all on nasal saline irrigations, a big proportion would not have any symptoms anymore,” he said.

From New York Times ● May 12, 2011

Using satellite imagery between 1998 and 2002, Beman and colleagues discovered algae blooms up to 220 square miles large that followed just days after the periodic irrigations in the valley.

From Washington Post

So allocating more elbow room allows vegetables to get larger and yield longer and allows the gardener to reduce the frequency of irrigations.

From Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway by Steve Solomon