oil

1. 1.

   cover with oil, as if by rubbing

   “oil the wooden surface”

   Broadercover
2. 2.

   administer an oil or ointment to; often in a religious ceremony of blessing

   Synonymsanointinunctaneleembrocate

   Broaderbless

Other forms of oil

plural

oils·

past tense

oiled·

present participle

oiling·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about oil

What does oil mean?

oil means "a slippery or viscous liquid or liquefiable substance not miscible with water". That is the primary sense; the word has 6 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in oil?

oil has 1 syllable: oil. In IPA it is /ˈɔɪl/.

What is another word for oil?

Close synonyms include oil color, oil colour, petroleum, crude oil, crude. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is oil a common word?

oil is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.