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A washing machine is a machine designed to clean laundry, such as clothing, towels and sheets. The term is generally applied only to machines that use water as the primary cleaning solution, as opposed to dry cleaning (which uses alternative cleaning fluids, and is generally performed by specialist businesses) or even ultrasonic cleaners.

Washing machines are available in two main configurations: top loading and front loading. The top loading design, most popular in the United States, Canada, Australia and some parts of Europe, places the clothes in a vertically-mounted cylinder, with a propeller-like agitator in the center of the bottom of the cylinder.

Top loading machines in Asia use impellers instead of agitators. Impellers are similar to agitators except that they do not have the center post extending up in the middle of the wash tub basket. Clothes are loaded through the top of the machine, which is covered with a hinged door.

Thefront loading design, most popular in Europe and the Middle East, mounts the cylinder horizontally, and loading is through a glass door at the front of the machine. The cylinder is also called the drum. Agitation is supplied by the back-and-forth rotation of the cylinder and by gravity.

The clothes are lifted up by paddles in the drum and then dropped. This motion flexes the weave of the fabric and forces water and detergent solution through the clothes load. Although rarer, there is also a variant of the horizontal axis design that is loaded from the top, through a small door in the circumference of the drum. These machines usually have a shorter cylinder and are therefore smaller.

The engineering goals in the design and construction of a washing machine or a dryer are opposites, since one machine adds water to the laundry and the other removes it. During the wash cycle, the large drying fan, ducting and heating elements must all be protected from water.

During the drying cycle, watertight rubber seals must not be damaged by heat. And in all cases, the complexity of the mechanism within the confines of a cabinet which will be maneoverable through standard doorways, will limit the volume of the drum and therefore quantity of laundry which may be washed.

A clothes dryer should be of the front-loading design; a top-loading dryer would not tumble wet clothing at the bottom of the drum. A combo unit is therefore forced to have a horizontal drum, even though front-loading washers have traditionally been unpopular in North America usually due to cost reasons.

Another problem with some such machines is that only half of the laundry can be dried after the washing process is complete, because drying requires more drum volume for a given load. However, by intelligently controlling the drying temperature and drum speed, most washer/dryers are capable of performing both functions in a single machine without interruption and with the full laundry load.

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