to wipe the snot
1
8.7
- phrasal verb
- Informal
- After the cold air made his nose run, he had to wipe the snot away before entering the classroom.
Examples
-
She quickly wiped the snot from her nose with a tissue before speaking to her friends.
-
Your nose ran, always ran, and you wiped the snot on your sleeves until they turned stiff, from cuff to elbow.
Fiction book (1990) -
Parents often have to wipe the snot from their children's faces during winter season.
Synonyms
131
1.0
Remove dirt or marks from a surface by rubbing with a cloth
47
2.0
To remove something from a surface by moving a cloth over it, like tears or dirt
15
2.6
To remove liquid or dirt from a floor with a cloth
12
1.8
To clean a surface using a cloth or towel to remove a spill
How Clean
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'to remove nasal mucus by wiping' is directly and transparently derived from combining 'wipe' (to remove by rubbing) with 'snot' (nasal mucus); the determiner 'the' does not alter compositional meaning. This is a literal, easily inferable action verb + object construction found cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents will understand it.
Etymology
Wipe the snot comes from the clear, everyday image of using a tissue or sleeve to wipe the snot, the wet stuff from the nose, from a child's or your own face. So it simply means 'to remove nasal mucus'.