Other forms: bought, buying, buys
To buy something is to hand over money and take the thing away. A coffee, a train ticket, a house, twenty minutes of parking.
Buy is irregular, and the spelling changes completely: buy, bought, bought. You buy something FROM a shop or a person, and you buy it FOR someone, or you buy someone a drink. It is a noun as well, so a good buy is a bargain and the best buy is the one the magazine recommends. Two everyday phrases stretch it further. To buy something, in the sense of believing it, is what you do not do when an excuse sounds thin: I'm not buying that. And to buy time is to do something small in order to delay something big. Purchase is the formal twin, the word on receipts and in contracts; nobody says it at the till.
1verbbuyTo get something by paying money for it.~96%
“We buy our vegetables from the stall on the corner.”
synonyms: purchase, get, pick up
2verbbelieveTo believe something you have been told. Informal.~2%
“Nobody is going to buy that story.”
3nounbargainSomething worth the money paid for it.~2%
“At that price the coat was a very good buy.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: purchase
Old English bycġan meant to buy, and also to pay for, redeem and ransom, which is a wider job than shopping. Behind it lies Proto-Germanic *bugjaną, to buy, whose own origin is uncertain: one proposal ties it to a root meaning to bend, another to one meaning to take away or deliver. The strange modern spelling and the strange modern sound come from two different parts of England, the u from the south-west and the pronunciation from the East Midlands.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰūgʰ- — to bend
Proto-Germanic
*bugjaną — to buy
Proto-West Germanic
*buggjan
Old English
bycġan — to buy, pay for, acquire, redeem, ransom, procure, get done, sell
Middle English
byen
English, today
buy
From Middle English byen, from Old English bycġan (“to buy, pay for, acquire, redeem, ransom, procure, get done, sell”), from Proto-West Germanic buggjan, from Proto-Germanic bugjaną (“to buy”), of uncertain origin. Perhaps from Proto-Indo-European bʰūgʰ- (“to bend”), or from Proto-Indo-European bʰewgʰ- (“to take away, deliver”). Cognate with Scots buy (“to buy, purchase”), obsolete Dutch beugen (“to buy”), Old Saxon buggian, buggean (“to buy”), Old Norse byggja (“to build, settle”), Gothic 𐌱𐌿𐌲𐌾𐌰𐌽 (“to buy”). The spelling with “u” is from the Southwest, while the pronunciation with is from the East Midlands.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA