Other forms: beds
A bed is the piece of furniture you sleep in. Go to bed, make the bed, a double bed.
Go to bed takes no article, and in bed means both in it and asleep. The word also means a base or a layer: a flower bed, a river bed, a bed of rock, a bed of rice. Note bed and breakfast; get out of bed on the wrong side; make your bed and lie in it; and that in hospitals a bed is a unit of capacity — the hospital has four hundred beds.
1nounbedThe furniture you sleep in.~98%
“The bed takes up about half the room.”
2nounbaseA base or layer of something.~2%
“The fish was served on a bed of rice with a lemon sauce.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
bed is furniture, or a base layer.
Old English bedd is Germanic and may come from a root meaning to dig — a bed was originally a dug-out sleeping place. That would make the garden bed and the sleeping bed the same word for the same hole.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰedʰ-
Middle English
bed
English, today
bed
From Middle English bed. Middle English bed, bedde, from Old English bedd, from Proto-West Germanic badi, from Proto-Germanic badją (“resting-place, plot of ground”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA