Other forms: belts
A belt is the band you wear round your waist to hold your trousers up. Leather, a buckle, and a row of holes you slowly work through.
Machines wear them too, since a fan belt and a conveyor belt are both loops that transmit or carry. Geography borrows the word for long strips of land, giving the green belt round a city and the Bible Belt across America. It carries idiom about effort and restraint — tightening your belt means spending less, and something under your belt is safely achieved. Informally, to belt along is to travel very fast.
1nounbeltA strip of leather or cloth worn round the waist.~50%
“He let his belt out a notch.”
2nouncontinuousA continuous band in a machine, or a long strip of land.~50%
“The conveyor belt jammed twice.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin
balteus — belt, sword-belt
Proto-Germanic
*baltijaz — girdle, belt
Proto-West Germanic
*baltī̆
Old English
belt — belt, girdle
Middle English
belt
English, today
belt
From Middle English belt, from Old English belt (“belt, girdle”), from Proto-West Germanic baltī̆, from Proto-Germanic baltijaz (“girdle, belt”), from Latin balteus (“belt, sword-belt”), of ett - origin. Cognate with Scots belt (“belt”), Dutch belt, German Balz (“belt”), Danish bælte (“belt”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk belte (“belt”), Swedish bälte (“belt, cincture, girdle, zone”), Faroese and Icelandic belti (“belt”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA