Other forms: boots, booted, booting
A boot is a shoe that comes up over your ankle and keeps the weather out. Mud drying on the doorstep, laces pulled tight round the hooks, one heel jammed against the other to lever it off.
In Britain the boot is also the back of a car, the space you drop the shopping into, and Americans call that same space the trunk. Computers boot: you press the button and wait while the machine boots up, and a slow one takes a minute. Kick a ball hard enough and you have booted it down the field. The word keeps a small crowd of phrases as well — give someone the boot and they have lost their job, do a thing to boot and you have done it as well as everything else, and a car boot sale is a Sunday field full of people selling old plates out of the backs of their cars.
1nounbootA strong shoe that covers the ankle, and sometimes the whole lower leg.~60%
“She pulled her boots on at the door and went out into the rain.”
synonyms: wellington, welly
2nouncarIn British English, the storage space at the back of a car.~2%
“The shopping is still in the boot.”
synonyms: trunk
3verbstartTo start a computer up, so that it loads its software and is ready to use.~36%
“The old laptop takes a full minute to boot.”
synonyms: start up
4verbkickTo kick something hard.~2%
“He booted the ball over the wall and into the neighbour's garden.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 141 sentences found in the wild and placed 110 of them on a sense (31 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: boots
Three separate words are wearing the same four letters. The shoe is the oldest: Middle English bote, from Old French bote, a high thick shoe. The boot in to boot is a different word entirely — Old English bōt, meaning help, relief, advantage, so something done to boot was done to your advantage. And the boot a computer does is younger than either: it is simply bootstrap, cut short.
Middle English
bote
English, today
boot
Built from
From Middle English bote. From Middle English boote, bote (“shoe”), from Old French bote (“a high, thick shoe”). Of obscure origin, but probably related to Old French bot (“club-foot”), bot (“fat, short, blunt”), from Old Frankish butt, from Proto-Germanic buttaz, butaz (“cut off, short, numb, blunt”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰewt-, bʰewd- (“to strike, push, shock”); if so, a a doublet of butt. Compare Old Norse butt (“stump”), Low German butt (“blunt, plump”), Old English bytt (“small piece of land”), buttuc (“end”). More at buttock and debut.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA