soe

plural soes

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

   "[…] 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".

   1662, Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheism, Book II, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More, p. 55

1. obsoleteObsolete form of so.

   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 […]

   1830, Christopher Merrett, letter to Thomas Browne

plural SOEs

1. abbreviationinitialismbusinessInitialism of state-owned enterprise.

   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.

1. abbreviationhistoricalinitialismWorld War IIInitialism of Special Operations Executive.

   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.

   2021 May 9, Andrew Gumbel, “Raid on Dieppe masked secret mission to steal Nazis’ Enigma machine”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

plural Soes

1. A surname.

1. 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.

   n.d., “Soe Gewog”, in Dzongkhag Administration Thimphu, Bhutan, archived from the original on 20 Dec 2025