Other forms: bent, bending, bends
Bend is what you do to something straight to make it curve. You bend a coat hanger back into shape, bend down to tie a lace, bend your knees before you lift the box.
Things also bend by themselves: the road bends left after the bridge, a branch bends under snow. As a noun, a bend is the curve itself — a bend in the river, a sharp bend in the pipe under the sink. The past tense is bent, never bended, and bent works as an adjective too: a bent nail, a bent spoon. People bend the rules when they stretch them without quite breaking them, and bend over backwards when they try far too hard to help. Keep it apart from fold: you bend metal and wire, you fold paper and cloth.
1verbbendTo make something straight or flat become curved.~2%
“She was bending the wire into a hook to fish the key out of the drain.”
2verbfollowTo become curved; to follow a curve.~16%
“The road bends sharply to the left just after the bridge.”
3verbleanTo lean your body forward or downward.~32%
“You have to bend down to get through the low doorway.”
4nounriverA curve in a road, river, pipe or other long thing.~48%
“There is a bend in the pipe where the water keeps collecting.”
5verbchangeTo change a rule or the truth a little to suit yourself.~2%
“They will bend the rules to let her sit the exam a week late.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English bendan meant to bind or bend a bow — to fetter, to restrain — and it goes back through Proto-Germanic to the Indo-European root *bʰendʰ-, to bind or tie. That is why bend sits in the same family as bind, band and bond. The oldest bending was done with a string: you bent a bow by tying it into a curve.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰendʰ-
Old English
bendan
Middle English
benden
English, today
bend
From Middle English benden, from Old English bendan. From Middle English benden, from Old English bendan (“to bind or bend (a bow), fetter, restrain”), from Proto-West Germanic bandijan, from Proto-Germanic bandijaną (“to bend”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰendʰ- (“to bind, tie”). Cognate with Middle High German benden (“to fetter”), Danish bænde (“to bend”), Norwegian bende (“to bend”), Faroese benda (“to bend, inflect”), Icelandic benda (“to bend”). Related to bind, band, bond.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA