Understanding the interaction of water molecules with the surfaces of different materials has become an important field of research. A large body of theoretical and experimental research work has been dedicated to understanding how interfacial water interacts with the surface structure/chemistry of materials. The underlying mechanism on which many applications are based is, in fact, the interaction of materials with liquids. This necessitates further investigations on wetting dynamics of materials. Motivated by the gaps in the knowledge in this domain, we have performed a systematic study of water contact angle and surface free energy determination on less explored oxide thin-films and two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals structures ranging from exotic rare-earth oxides (REOs) to graphene, MoS2, WS2 and their hetero-structures. Besides these macroscale measurements, we also show an atomic scale approach to locally probe the wetting properties of materials.