wash: [OE] Etymologically, to wash something is probably to clean it with ‘water’. Like German waschen, Dutch wasschen, and Swedish vaska, it goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *waskan, which seems to have been derived from *wat-, the base which produced English water. (Washer ‘small disc with a hole’ [14] is usually assumed to come from the same source, but its semantic link with wash has never been satisfactorily explained.) => water
