Other forms: betting, bets
A bet is an agreement to pay if you are wrong about a result. Place a bet, win a bet, a safe bet.
It stakes money on an outcome, and the odds say what the payout is. A safe bet is a near certainty and a long shot is the opposite. I bet is used constantly to mean I am fairly sure, with no money involved, and you bet is an emphatic yes. Note hedge your bets, meaning to back more than one outcome; and don't bet on it, which means do not rely on it.
1nounbetAn agreement to pay if you are wrong about a result.~78%
“I made a bet with my brother that our team would win, and I lost ten pounds.”
2verbfeelTo make such an agreement, or to feel fairly sure.~22%
“I bet you can't eat the whole pizza by yourself.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
bet is a wager.
The word appears in sixteenth-century criminal slang with no certain source — possibly from an old sense of bet meaning advantage, possibly clipped from abet. It is one of the commonest English words with the least known history.
Old English
bet
Middle English
bet — something better, advantage, luck
English, today
bet
Built from
From 16th-century criminal slang, perhaps from Middle English bet (“something better, advantage, luck”), from Old English bet, bett (“better”); or, alternatively from abet, from Middle English abet, abette, from Old French abet (“incitement to evil”), from Old French abeter (“to entice”), from a- (“to”) + beter (“hound on, urge, to bait”); ultimately from Proto-West Germanic baitijan (“to bait, entice”), related to Old English bǣtan (“to bait”). More at abet.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA