A washing machine (laundry machine, washing machine, clothes washer, or washer) is a machine to wash laundry, such as clothing and sheets. The term is mostly applied only to machines that use water as opposed to dry cleaning (which uses alternative cleaning fluids, and is performed by specialist businesses) or ultrasonic cleaners. Washing entails immersing, dipping, rubbing, or scrubbing in water usually accompanied by detergent, or bleach. The simplest machines may simply agitate clothes in water while switched on; automatic machines may fill, empty, wash, spin, and heat in a cycle.
Read more about Washing Machine: Wash Cycles, Efficiency and Standards, Equipment Durability, Commercial Use, Social Impact, Environmental Impact, Manufacturers and Brands
Famous quotes containing the words washing and/or machine:
“...you don’t have to be as good as white people, you have to be better or the best. When Negroes are average, they fail, unless they are very, very lucky. Now, if you’re average and white, honey, you can go far. Just look at Dan Quayle. If that boy was colored he’d be washing dishes somewhere.”
—Annie Elizabeth Delany (b. 1891)
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)