Other forms: blows, blowing, blew, blown
To blow is to push air out through your lips. Blowing out the candles on a cake, blowing on a spoonful of soup that is still too hot, blowing into your cupped hands at a bus stop in January.
The wind blows, and it blows things about: a hat into the road, a door shut, a tree down across the railway line. Machines borrow the word — a fuse blows, a tyre blows out — and you blow your nose. The forms are irregular: blew, blown, never blowed. A completely different blow is a hit, a blow to the head, and from there a piece of very bad news, so losing the contract was a blow to the whole team. Informally, to blow money is to spend it fast on nothing, and to blow it is to lose your one chance.
1verbblowTo push air out through your lips.~17%
“Blow on it — it is still too hot.”
synonyms: puff
2verbwindOf the wind: to move, and to push things about.~14%
“The wind blows straight off the sea here.”
3nounhitA hard hit with a hand or an object.~24%
“A blow to the side of the head knocked him down.”
4nounbadA piece of very bad news, or a serious setback.~45%
“Losing the contract was a blow to the whole team.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 126 sentences found in the wild and placed 42 of them on a sense (84 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
There are two blows here and they were never one word. The blow you make with your lips is Old English blāwan — to blow, to breathe, to inflate — from a root meaning to swell. The blow that lands on a jaw comes from a Germanic verb meaning to beat, and it is related to block. English spelled the pair the same and let them get on with it.
Middle English
blowen
English, today
blow
From Middle English blowen. From Middle English blowen, from Old English blāwan (“to blow, breathe, inflate, sound”), from Proto-West Germanic blāan, from Proto-Germanic blēaną (“to blow”) (compare German blähen), from Proto-Indo-European bʰleh₁- (“to swell, blow up”) (compare Latin flō (“to blow”) and xcl բեղուն (“fertile”)).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA