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this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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If everything water touches is wet, and water touches itself, then water is wet.
wetting is the process of a liquid adhering to a surface. water by definition can't be wet
Liquids don't have surfaces?
The property of cohesion means that water is touching and adhering to the surface of other water molecules.
It doesn't change Tom Fitton being a shit, but facts do matter.
Then literally everything is wet, because the air contains water molecules! But we don't say everything is wet, just like water molecules touching water molecules don't make each other wet.
The water in the air is not liquid water. Unless it's raining, in which case it's very much liquid water, and you're very wet if you're standing in it
Yes, the water in the air is not liquid water, just like individual water molecules are not liquid water. You got it!
An individual water molecule is not liquid, but if it's touching other water molecules that are in a liquid state, then it is wet.
Water molecules can't be in a liquid state, it's only the aggregate that's liquid. Therefore water molecules can't be wet.
A water molecule (singular) can't be in a liquid state. Water molecules (plural) can be in a liquid state. It's important to be precise with our language here
A single water molecule cannot physically touch enough other water molecules for them to be considered liquid. It can touch water molecules which touch other water molecules, in aggregate making them a liquid, but that makes the water molecule itself part of the liquid, which means it cannot be wet.
How many molecules need to be touching to be considered an aggregate?
What is humidity other than the measurement of how saturated the air is with water vapor (or how wet the air is)
I mean I'd say that counts as wet.
So literally everything on the surface of the planet, in every building, in every room, is wet? That makes it a completely useless definition and is obviously not what anyone means when they're talking about something being "wet".
It's not useless if you understand wet as a relative term. There can be a normal level of wetness where if it is exceeded we then call that thing wet, and if it's under that threshold we call it dry relative to the norm.
If air with 0% humidity can be called dry, then air with humidity can be called wet.
Language isn't perfect and it's often contextual. If someone wants to describe a property of water based on a newer usage in physics, maybe choose a newer word.
Yet we don't do this, we call it humid.
But then what is humidity if not a measurement of how wet the air is?
A measurement of humidity, as the name suggests.
Please just explain why we don't call humid air "wet". I've never heard anyone call it that in any language. How can this be?
Ahh okay, I think I get what you're getting at. It's like how if you dry off after a shower, your towel is damp and not wet because you're just looking at saturation.
I'd be surprised if other languages call the air "wet" because that's an English word. In Chinese, we'd call humidity 湿度 which means "degree of wet".
Yep, you put it better than I did! Even if the air is fully humid, you're still not wet, as there won't be liquid water on you. Once there's enough to actually form liquid water, you'll be wet.
Fair point, I didn't know about Chinese. I was talking about other languages I know, none of which refer to humidity as wetness (in the respective language obviously), they all use separate words.
So then why isn't water wet if there is clearly liquid water touching liquid water?
While I agree that water is wet in general, I don't think this is a complete question. It's somewhat difficult to answer because I don't know what the person asking's expectations are.
Water is wet if we're talking about how it feels to interact with and how it will make us wet too.
Water isn't wet if we're talking about things which are supposed to be dry but aren't, like when surveying the damage after a spill.
I don't mean to butt in if the two of you are just having fun, but this Vsauce video on the philosophy of definitions might help sort through some of the more confusing feelings.
Except for the fact that water by definition is wet
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wet
Fun fact: there is no such thing as a universally accepted definition. Words mean what we mean when we say them. And the vast majority of people use "wet" to describe something that is made up of, touching, or covered in a liquid, especially water. The arbitrary assertion that the definition somehow only applies to solids is just facile contrarianism with no actual basis in linguistics.
yeah but you know what the vast majority of people are like
Solid (frozen) water, commonly referred to as "ice," can have a surface.
is ice wet?
It can be, but the ice itself is not wet.
By your bizarre definition, yes.
Please offer a better definition that doesn't cover other, worse, edge cases. Bonus points if it's useful.
"That which water touches is wet" means air, deserts, and even space can be wet. That seems less than meaningful.
EtA: Also, just wait until you learn about henges
It's not "less than meaningful" if you understand wet as a relative term. There can be a normal level of wetness where if it is exceeded we then call that thing wet, and if it's under that threshold we call it dry relative to the norm.
If you somehow came from a perfectly dry environment, yeah, you would probably consider our world pretty wet. You would have a pretty hard time describing your experience to others if you couldn't use the word wet to do so. The word doesn't lose meaning just because you go all reductio ad adsurdum with it.
"Wet" Is used as an adjective describing something that consists of or is touching some liquid. Nobody seems to have a problem with the concept of wet paint. I can't imagine anyone other than Sheldon Cooper saying "technically the wall is wet, the paint is liquid!" If you would say that, I have a locker to shove you in
Does that mean that lava is wet? How about glass? Or a mercury thermometer? Or space, touching liquid/plasmatic hydrogen (or liquified gasses)?
I wouldn't call any of those wet in my daily life.
Sure. I wouldn't usually refer to lava as wet, but I also don't interact with it very often. Glass is an amorphous solid, so not liquid and so not wet unless it's touching something liquid or is liquid itself. Liquid mercury exists outside of thermometers as well, and it's wet both in one and out of one. Space isn't a thing, and so it you can't be in contact with anything, and so concepts like wetness and dryness don't really apply.
I also wouldn't call any of those wet in my daily life, largely because I don't interact with them very often. I don't get into hyper pedantic arguments about the ways we define words very often in real life either. Most people simply agree that water is wet
https://feddit.uk/comment/17348047
And thus space, deserts, and air is wet. Which is pretty useless asa definition.
That's the actual definition. That's why bad solder joints are called dry joints and melting the solder across a soldering iron tip is called wetting the tip.
But that's not the definition of wet. Wet is something having liquid adhere to it, usually water. It's a gained quality. Water doesn't adhere to itself, it can't gain the quality of being wet because it is the thing that gives that quality. It's like saying that fire is burnt. It does the burning.
Water literally adheres to itself. That's one of its most important qualities.
Does heat heat itself?
Since heat is thermal energy, it can transfer this thermal energy but it loses some due to the second law of thermodynamics. Water doesn't lose the ability to adhere to other things when it transfers, so the two phenomenon are not really equateable.
You are conflating semantics with physics.
In physics, the definition of wet is widely "that which water adheres to" and excludes water, as other definitions typically lack utility. End of discussion, at least until you define a context where some other definition is more useful and also coherent with the discourse.
Also, heat does not lose thermal energy - energy cannot be destroyed, the 2nd law applies only to states - not energy, and pedantically: heat is the transfer of thermal energy, so heat is still heat regardless of amount of thermal energy.
Fair enough, heat can't lose heat. However when it interacts with a substance some of the energy is "lost" in that it transfers to the substance. Unless it is a completely inert material.
Can you hold a unit of heat? Or do you hold a substance that is imbued with heat energy? Seems like a good reason to say the two are not equateable, which was the main point.
Other than that, a specific fields definition of wet does not make the term exclusive to that field. In aquatic science, wet still means something that water is adhering to. Water adheres to itself so water is wet.
Heat is indeed hot.
Water is cohesive which means yes, it does attach to itself. It's one of the main reasons capillary action works and your blood flows the way it does.
obviously not a lot of blood flow going on in this thread
Actually fire is the byproduct of a chemical reaction. The material being combusted is the one doing the burning. Fire (rather, extreme heat) can cause combustion in other materials, given an oxygen rich environment, but the fire is not itself doing the combustion or burning.
Wetness is not a chemical reaction, so it's kind of an apples to oranges comparison.
You can’t wet a lake
Because it's already wet