hoover
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈhuːvə(ɹ)/
ipa: /ˈhuvɚ/
rhymes: -uːvə(ɹ)
Forms: form: hoovers
form: hoovering
form: hoovered
form: hoovered
form: Hoover
Etymology: Genericized trademark of Hoover, the brand name of one of the first vacuum cleaners, which was sold by The Hoover Company. The American company was founded by William Henry Hoover (1849–1932) and his son Herbert William Hoover, Sr. (1877–1954). The surname Hoover is an Anglicized version of the German Huber, originally designating a landowner or a prosperous small-scale farmer.
Senses: examples: text: I need to hoover this room.
text: This time Robbie was dreaming about Mr Spatchley's ducks. They had all come alive and were flying around the office whilst Robbie desperately tried to hoover the floor. There were ducks everywhere, on the desk and mantelpiece and padding around on the floor, knocking things over and quacking indignantly.
ref: 2000, Tanya David; Dennis Pepper, comp., “Dogends”, in The New Young Oxford Book of Ghost Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, pages 30–31:
text: In the freshly hoovered living room of her house in Wokingham, Thelma Dawnton was distinctly miffed.
ref: 2006, Stella Rimington, Secret Asset, London: Hutchinson, ISBN 978-0-09-180024-6; republished New York, N.Y.: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2008, ISBN 978-1-4000-7982-7, page 210
text: In honour of my visit, he'd gotten rid of 'most' of the cobwebs, and washed and hoovered the walls next to the bed. Hoovered the walls? What sort of creatures were living in the gaps in the stone that would need to be hoovered out?
ref: 2009, Ariel Leve, The Cassandra Chronicles, London: Portobello, →ISBN:
text: After I'd eaten my dinner on Saturday, Mum said I could start earning some money by hoovering the lounge. She got the hoover out, plugged it in and said that she would come and inspect the carpet after she had finished clearing the dinner things away. […] I had started off hoovering the carpet, but after about twelve pushes I got a bit bored.
ref: 2015, Kes Gray, Daisy and the Trouble with Piggy Banks, London: Red Fox, →ISBN:
glosses: To clean (a room, etc.) with a vacuum cleaner, irrespective of brand.
examples: text: I'd hoover, iron or dust, but I hated doing windows.
text: […] she was always in trouble for not hoovering behind the bed picked up what I could of it still there after he hoovered […]
ref: 2001, Ali Smith, Hotel World, London: Hamish Hamilton, →ISBN:
text: A woman from a funding agency visited the station for a meeting early one morning, and when she arrived I was doing the hoovering. My colleague introduced us and we chatted for a bit. Then she asked me what my job was and I told her 'station manager'. She looked really puzzled, and asked 'so why are you doing the hoovering?' I answered, 'because the floor was dirty.'
ref: 2005, Ally Fogg, Phil Korbel, Cathy Brooks, Steve Lee, “Money and Monitoring”, in Community Radio Toolkit, Manchester: Radio Regen, →ISBN, page 78:
text: Up and down the wooden stairs of the house in Cambridge large balls of dust and dog hair bounced. Toby wondered whether John Lambert III, if he'd stuck around, would have hoovered. The hoover stopped and the man wound in the cord, admiring his handiwork. The silence pounded against Toby's eardrums. It seemed that real men hoovered.
ref: 2007, Olivia Liberty, Falling, London: Atlantic Books, →ISBN:
glosses: To use a vacuum cleaner, irrespective of brand.
examples: text: 'You're probably thinking I'm a slob,' said Lister, finishing off a quintuple-thick milkshake and hoovering around the base with the straw.
ref: 1989, Grant Naylor, Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers:
text: Then there is the little-known family of organisms called hantaviruses, which swarm in the micro-haze above the feces of mice and rats and are hoovered into the human respiratory system by anyone unlucky enough to stick a breathing orifice near them—by lying down, say, on a sleeping platform over which infected mice have recently scampered.
ref: 1998, Bill Bryson, chapter 1, in A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, New York, N.Y.: Anchor Books, →ISBN, page 8:
text: The early models of famine early warning systems adopted the approach of gathering all possible (or measurable) indicators, adding them up and deducing vulnerability. This was termed the hoovering approach—vulnerability was the weight of the bag after vacuuming up everything in sight (hoovering is the British word for vacuuming).
ref: 2003, Thomas E. Downing, “Lessons from Famine Early Warning and Food Security for Understanding Adaptation to Climate Change: Toward a Vulnerability/Adaptation Science?”, in Joel B. Smith, Richard J. T. Klein, Saleemul Huq, editors, Climate Change, Adaptive Capacity and Development, London: Imperial College Press, →ISBN, pages 72–73:
text: We devoured the food, and all along we three boys were bubbling with excitement, telling Mom about the hole. As Dad "hoovered" away, slurping, chewing, gulping, and snorting, Rudy said, "Mom, you would not believe the hole; it's beautiful. Jeffrey designed it and we dug it together ... even Berto helped."
ref: 2016, Al Bolea, Leanne Atwater, Applied Leadership Development: Nine Elements of Leadership Mastery (Leadership: Research and Practice Series), New York, N.Y.; Hove, East Sussex: Routledge, →ISBN:
glosses: To suck in or inhale, as if by a vacuum cleaner.
Synonyms: word: to vacuum
Derived terms: hoover up