Other forms: compounds, compounded, compounding
A compound is a substance made when two or more elements join chemically and become something new. Water is a compound: hydrogen and oxygen, behaving like neither of them.
The other compound is a place, a group of buildings inside a wall or fence, like an embassy compound or a farm compound. As an adjective it means made of parts joined together: a compound word such as football or sunflower, compound interest, a compound fracture, the compound eye of a fly. As a verb it means to make a bad thing worse, so heavy rain compounded the problems on the road. And the stress moves with the job: COMpound for the noun, comPOUND for the verb.
1nouncompoundA substance made of two or more elements chemically joined.~38%
“Salt is a compound of sodium and chlorine.”
2nounbuildingsA group of buildings inside a fence or wall.~16%
“Guards stood at the gate of the compound.”
3adjectivetogetherMade of two or more parts joined together.~44%
“A compound word like toothbrush is two words pushed into one.”
4verbworsenTo make an already bad situation worse.~2%
“The delay compounded an already difficult week.”
synonyms: worsen, aggravate
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
compound is a substance.
comPOUND → POUNDed together into one
Two different things pounded together into one, and once that is done you cannot pick them apart again.
hooks ontopound
The compound that means a walled group of buildings is not a Latin word at all. It came from Malay kampung, a group of buildings or village, carried back to Europe by Dutch and Portuguese traders, then reshaped to look like the other, older English compound it had nothing to do with. Kampung is still sitting inside it in disguise.
Malay
kampung
English, today
compound
Built from
From Malay kampung. Possibly from Malay kampong, kampung (“group of buildings, village”), via Dutch - or Portuguese -, altered under the influence of Etymology 2. a doublet of kampung.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA