Moisture generally refers to the presence of water, often in trace amounts.
The moisture content is often an important aspect of foodstuffs including cheese and many dried goods such as tea where excess moisture can promote bacterial growth, decay, molding, or rotting over time.
Excessive moisture is usually undesirable and can also cause rot in wood or other organic material, corrosion in metals, and electrical short circuits. Many home and business owners go to great pains to prevent these effects. Many products are sold to prevent this. Some foodstuffs and other packaged products come with desiccators, often made of silicon oxide, to absorb moisture.
In skin, leather, and wood, moisture can also refer to natural oils.
Moisture is also sometimes used to refer to the liquid form of solvents other than water, especially when present in a solid.
Moisture is also used to refer to any type of precipitation.
| The
Damp by |
WHEN I am dead, and doctors know not why,
And my friends'
curiosity
Will have me cut up to survey each part,
When they shall find your picture in my heart,
You think a sudden damp
of love
Will thorough all their
senses move,
And work on them as me, and so prefer
Your murder to the name of massacre,
Poor victories; but if you dare be brave,
And pleasure in your
conquest have,
First kill th' enormous giant, your Disdain;
And let th' enchantress Honour, next be slain;
And like a Goth and
Vandal rise,
Deface records and
histories
Of your own arts and triumphs over men,
And without such advantage kill me then,
For I could muster up, as well as you,
My giants, and my witches
too,
Which are vast Constancy and Secretness;
But these I neither look for nor profess;
Kill me as woman, let me
die
As a mere man; do you but
try
Your passive valour, and you shall find then,
Naked you have odds enough of any man.
DAMP, a common Teutonic word, meaning vapour or mist (cf. Ger. Dampf, steam), and hence moisture. In its primitive sense the word persists in the vocabulary of coal-miners. Their "firedamp" (formerly fulminating damp) is marsh gas, which, when mixed with air and exploded, produced "choke damp," "after damp," or "suffocating damp" (carbon dioxide). "Black damp" consists of accumulations of irrespirable gases, mostly nitrogen, which cause the lights to burn dimly, and the term "white damp" is sometimes applied to carbon monoxide. As a verb, the word means to stifle or check; hence damped vibrations or oscillations are those which have been reduced or stopped, instead of being allowed to die out naturally; the "dampers" of the piano are small pieces of feltcovered wood which fall upon the strings and stop their vibrations as the keys are allowed to rise; and the "damper" of a chimney or flue, by restricting the draught, lessens the rate of combustion.
|
<< Damophon |
Categories: D-DAR
Contents |
Akin to Low German damp, Dutch damp, and Danish damp (“‘vapor, steam, fog’”), German Dampf, Icelandic dampi, Swedish damm (“‘dust’”), and to German dampf imperative of dimpfen (“‘to smoke’”). Also Old English dampen (“‘to choke, suffocate’”).
damp (comparative damper, superlative dampest)
|
Positive |
|
Singular |
Plural |
damp (countable and uncountable; plural damps)
|
Infinitive |
Third person singular |
Simple past |
Past participle |
Present participle |
to damp (third-person singular simple present damps, present participle damping, simple past and past participle damped) (transitive)
|
Wikipedia da
damp c. (singular definite dampen, plural indefinite dampe)
damp
damp m. (plural dampen)
damp
|
|
Wikis
Search
