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.
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Famous quotes containing the words washing and/or machine:
“The California fever is not likely to take us off.... There is neither romance nor glory in digging for gold after the manner of the pictures in the geography of diamond washing in Brazil.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The momentary charge at Balaklava, in obedience to a blundering command, proving what a perfect machine the soldier is, has, properly enough, been celebrated by a poet laureate; but the steady, and for the most part successful, charge of this man, for some years, against the legions of Slavery, in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than that as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine. Do you think that that will go unsung?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)