Ooze

Ooze (pronounced ooz)

(1) Of moisture, liquid etc, to flow, percolate, or exude slowly, as through holes or small openings.

(2) To move or pass slowly or gradually, as if through a small opening or passage:

(3) The act of oozing, to make by oozing; to exude (moisture, air etc) slowly.

(4) Something that oozes; the product or the result from oozing.

(5) In geology, the technical word for a calcareous or siliceous mud composed chiefly of the shells of one-celled organisms, covering parts of the ocean bottom; a soft thin mud found at the bottom of lakes and rivers

(6) In commercial tanning, an infusion of vegetable matter, such as sumach or oak bark.

(7) Secretion, humor (said now to be rare).

(8) Juice, sap (obsolete except when used as a verb describing process).

(9) Of something abstract, such as information or confidence, to appear or disappear slowly or imperceptibly (often followed by out or away).

Pre 900: The noun wass from the Middle English wose (sap), from the Old English wōs (sap, froth, juice, moisture) and wāse (soft mud, mire), from the Proto-Germanic wōsą & wosan (related to the Middle Low German wose (scum), the Old High German wasal (rain) and the Old Swedish os & oos), from the primitive Indo-European wósehz (sap) (related to the Sanskrit वसा (vásā) (fat)).  Also of influence was the Old English wāse (mud), related to the Old French wāse and the Old Norse veisa.  The other Proto-Germanic link was waison (source also of the Old Saxon waso (wet ground, mire) and the Old Norse veisa (pond of stagnant water), probably from a primitive long-lost Indo-European root meaning "wet".  The modern spelling is from the mid-1500s.  The verb form meaning (1) "to flow as ooze, percolate through the pores of a substance" (intransitive) and (2) "to emit in the shape of moisture" (transitive) emerged in the late fourteenth century.  Wosen (the Old English verb was wesan) was a verbal derivative of the Old English noun wos (sap, froth, juice, moisture)," from Proto-Germanic wosan from same source as the noun ooze (n.).  The modern spelling is from the late sixteenth century.  Ooze is a noun & verb; oozed, oozle & oozing are verbs and oozy is an adjective; the noun plural is oozes.

Kim Jong-un (Kim III, b 1982; Supreme Leader of DPRK (North Korea) since 2011) watching industrial lubricant ooze into a 209 litre (the old 44 gallon (Imperial)) drum.

Lindsay Lohan having just had her T-shirt oozed upon in Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005).

The adjective was oozy which existed in Old English as wosig (juicy, moist) but the original sense is long obsolete, the meaning "containing or resembling fine soft mud; having the consistency of wet mud or slime" is from 1560s and the related form, ooziness, though rare, remains in occasional use.  Ooze and its derivatives are, to some degree, associated with words such as slime, mud, muck, sludge, marsh, bog, goo, silt, gunk, drain, seep, leak, dribble, percolate, trickle, exude, bleed, mire, fluid, gook, glop & alluvium yet none of them appear to evoke the same distaste as what is said to be the most disliked word in English: “moist”.

Calcareous-siliceous sediment distribution: The worldwide distribution of ooze.