Soe

//səʊ// conj, name, noun

conj, name, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    a large wooden vessel for carrying water, especially one to be carried on a pole between two people. obsolete

    ""[…] no more then a Pump grown dry will yield any water, unless you pour a little water into it first, and then for one Bason-ful you may fetch up so many Soe-fuls"."

  2. 2
    Initialism of state-owned enterprise. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism

    "2012, The Economist, Oct 6th 2012 issue, China’s state capitalism: Not just tilting at windmills Having seen post-Soviet state assets fall into the hands of oligarchs, China built up a select group of SOEs with cheap loans, land and energy, so that the wealth would remain with the party."

Conjunction
  1. 1
    Obsolete form of so. alt-of, obsolete

    "Many of the lupus piscis I have seen, and have bin informed by the king's fishmonger they are taken on our coast, but was not satisfied for some reasons of his relation soe as to enter it into my Pinax […]"

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    Initialism of Special Operations Executive. abbreviation, alt-of, historical, initialism

    "His luck was that SOE needed people fluent in European languages – a need that soon spawned the creation of an entire commando unit made up of largely Jewish refugees that became known as X-Troop."

  2. 2
    A surname.
  3. 3
    A gewog of Thimphu District, Bhutan.

    "The people of Soe Gewog depend largely on yak herding, dairy production, and collection of medicinal plants, particularly cordyceps (Yartsa Gunbu), which is a key source of cash income."

Example

More examples

""[…] no more then a Pump grown dry will yield any water, unless you pour a little water into it first, and then for one Bason-ful you may fetch up so many Soe-fuls"."

Etymology

Etymology 1

From Middle English sō (“large tub, vat”), from Old English sā (“a tub, pail, vessel”) and/or Old Norse sár (“large cask”) (acc. s.sá), both from Proto-Germanic *saihaz (“bucket, vat”), from Proto-Indo-European *seyk- (“to reach, grasp”). Cognate with Swedish så (“large wooden water vessel”).

Etymology 2

Borrowing from Burmese စိုး (cui:) and/or Teochew 蘇 /苏 (sou¹) or Hokkien 蘇 /苏 (So͘).

Etymology 3

Borrowed from Dzongkha སྲོས་ (sros).

Related phrases

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.