soot
Americannoun
verb (used with object)
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soots,
present (3rd person singular)
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sooted,
past participle, past
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sooting
present participle
noun
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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sootsimple
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sootssimple
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have sootedperfect
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has sootedperfect
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am sootingprogressive
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are sootingprogressive
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is sootingprogressive
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have been sootingperfect progressive
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has been sootingperfect progressive
Past
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sootedsimple
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had sootedperfect
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was sootingprogressive
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were sootingprogressive
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had been sootingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of soot
before 900; Middle English; Old English sōt; cognate with Old Norse sōt
Explanation
The powdery black stuff that's sometimes created when fuel burns is called soot. A chimney sweep's job is to clean all the soot and ash from inside a chimney. Soot is mostly made of carbon, and it forms when matter burns incompletely. Engines, burning coal, and house fires are all sources of soot, and soot is a major contributor to air pollution around the world. It's dangerous for people to breathe too much soot into their lungs. Soot comes from a Germanic root that literally means "what settles."
Vocabulary lists containing soot
Black and Gray
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Unit 4: Powerful Openings
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The Color of My Words
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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.
See Examples For:
Soda cans covered in soot still sit on the shelves.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 4, 2026
Traditional ink was generally made from soot, water, and a binder such as gum Arabic.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 26, 2026
Dead pine needles and soot carpet the forest floor.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 31, 2026
But the prospect also carries environmental risks if increased traffic accelerates Arctic melting, with soot emissions that settle on the ice cap trapping heat from sunlight.
From Barron's ● Aug. 22, 2026
It looked as if the entire cavalry had trampled on him, for his filthy shirt was the color of soot.
From "When the Sea Turned to Silver" by Grace Lin
Last year in Ramadan he imposed midnight curfew on coffeehouses and other soots where revelers congregated until dawn.
From Time Magazine Archive
His experiments covered all sorts of pigments, such as lamp-blacks, tars, carbonized vegetable matters, soots of oils and fats, and the various carbonized animal substances.
From Moon-Face by Jack London
Their warnin' sound our bizness soots, But bust the thought o' Silent Boots!
From Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 by Sir F. C. (Francis Cowley) Burnand
He looks big; he paints himself histrionically; he soots his face; he has a masterful dog, nothing half so fearful as a wolf-dog or bloodhound; and he raises his own manes, poor, stridulous Struldbrugs.
From The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 by Alexander H. (Alexander Hay) Japp
Yet though starved by the exhausted soil, and clogged by soots from innumerable chimneys, it remained majestic, finely decorative as some tree of metal, of age-old bronze roughened by a greenness of deep-eating rust.
From The Far Horizon by Lucas Malet
His design touch is about to turn the sooted, shut-down BlackHorn into Shelby Jean’s, which will soon be giving off warm and comfy vibes as a restaurant and pub.
From Washington Times ● Mar. 21, 2015
Squinting in the glare, 1,727 contestants sooted their sights with candles, tightened their slings, commenced firing at 5:50 a. m. over glistening grass.
From Time Magazine Archive
Some thought it was the edge of a huge and newly invented Nazi smoke screen blown in from the front, for London and the southeast British coast were also sooted.
From Time Magazine Archive
By the time we arrived there the snow had become drab and sooted, wet and heavy.
From "A Separate Peace" by John Knowles
It is a little cobbled byway, grimed with drifting smoke from the railway yards, littered with wind-blown papers and lined with small wooden and brick houses sooted almost to blackness.
From Mince Pie by Christopher Morley
The offensive production from Morant came on 12 of 19 sooting from the field and marked the ninth time in the past 10 games the All-Star guard reached the 30-point mark.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 8, 2022
The night-watchman, Alfred Swanson, took care of this curious plant, which consisted of a battery of petroleum lamps that were forced to burn to the sooting point.
From Edison, His Life and Inventions by Frank Lewis Dyer
After that all had gone well—except for a plug sooting on number three cylinder and a halt for petrol about fifty miles outside London.
From Men of Affairs by Roland Pertwee
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.
