Other forms: bleeding, bled, bleeds
To bleed is to lose blood from the body. A cut, a nosebleed, a graze on a knee.
The past tense is bled. The word extends to anything leaking out slowly, so colours bleed in the wash and a radiator is bled to let trapped air escape. Printing has a technical sense, where an image that bleeds runs right to the edge of the page. There is a strong figurative use about money, since bleeding somebody dry means taking everything they have.
Bleed is blood turned into a verb, and nothing more. Proto-Germanic blōdijaną is built straight off blōþą, blood.
Proto-Germanic
*blōdijaną — to bleed
Proto-West Germanic
*blōdijan
Old English
blēdan — to bleed
Middle English
bleden
English, today
bleed
Built from
From Middle English bleden, from Old English blēdan (“to bleed”), from Proto-West Germanic blōdijan, from Proto-Germanic blōdijaną (“to bleed”), from blōþą (“blood”). 2 Cognate with Scots blede, bleid (“to bleed”), stq bläide (“to bleed”), West Frisian bliede (“to bleed”), Dutch bloeden (“to bleed”), Low German blöden (“to bleed”), German bluten (“to bleed”), Danish bløde (“to bleed”), Swedish blöda (“to bleed”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 6 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word