wort

IPA/wɜːt/
IPA/wɝːt/

wort — noun

1. A sweet liquid produced from crushed grain and hot water before it is fermented

1.nounC1
Definition

A sweet liquid produced from crushed grain and hot water before it is fermented and turned into beer or whiskey.

Example

The brewer checked the temperature of the wort before adding the yeast.

After boiling the wort, Hari added hops to give the beer its bitter taste.

boiled wort + hops — brewing process sequence

Common collocations
  • hot wort
  • sweet wort
  • boiled wort
  • cooled wort
  • strain the wort
  • ferment the wort

Usage Note

Uncountable noun used mainly in professional brewing and home-brewing contexts. The wort is produced after mashing (mixing crushed malt with hot water) but before fermentation.

2. A word element that appears in the names of various plants, many of which have b

2.nounC1
Definition

A word element that appears in the names of various plants, many of which have been or are still used in traditional herbal medicine.

Example

St. John's wort is a common herb that some people use to improve their mood.

St. John's wort as a herbal remedy — most common example

Mizuki found a patch of liverwort growing on the damp soil near the stream.

liverwort in damp habitat — botanical context

Usage Note

Appears almost exclusively as the second part of a compound plant name (e.g. liverwort, milkwort, bladderwort, St. John's wort). Each compound name refers to a different plant family. The element itself has no independent botanical meaning in modern English outside these established names.

Synonym discussion

Sense: noun/1

All three terms are closely linked in the brewing process but refer to different stages or substances. Malt is the dried, germinated barley grain that provides the sugars. Mash is the mixture of crushed malt and hot water that is stirred and heated to extract those sugars. Wort is the liquid that drains off from the mash — it is the sugary solution ready to be boiled with hops and then fermented. In practice, home brewers often use the terms loosely, but in professional brewing the distinction matters: a problem with the malt affects the mash, and a problem with the mash affects the wort quality. For example: 'The malt was of poor quality, so the mash had a low sugar content, and the resulting wort was thin.'

malt ↗mash ↗wort ↗

Common collocations

Nouns

Etymology

Old EnglishMiddle EnglishEnglish

Comes from Old English 'wyrt', meaning 'plant, root, or herb'. The word is related to the German 'Wurz' (root) and Dutch 'wortel' (root). The brewing sense developed because the sweet grain liquid was originally seen as a kind of herbal or medicinal extract. The plant-name sense preserves the older, original meaning of 'wyrt' as simply a plant or herb. Over time, the two meanings split: one became a technical term in brewing, while the other survived mainly as a suffix in traditional plant names.