Other forms: consoles, consoled, consoling
To console someone is to comfort them when something has gone wrong. A hand on the shoulder after bad news, sitting with a child who has lost a race, the friend who turns up with food after a funeral.
Watch the stress, because the noun is a different word to say: you conSOLE a friend, but you play on a CONsole. A console is a machine for playing games on a television, and it is also a panel of controls and screens — a mixing console in a studio, the centre console between the front seats of a car, a console table standing against a hallway wall. Back on the verb: you console someone FOR a loss, or console yourself WITH something small, as in he consoled himself with the thought that it would have rained anyway. The noun from the verb is consolation, as in a consolation prize. Consoling fixes nothing; it makes the bad part easier to sit with.
1verbconsoleTo comfort someone who is unhappy or disappointed.
“Nothing anyone said could console her.”
2nounplayingA machine for playing video games, connected to a television.
“The console was still plugged in from the night before.”
3nounpanelA panel or desk holding the controls of a machine or a system.
“The engineer never left the console during the launch.”
4nounnarrowA narrow table that stands against a wall.
“Keys and unopened post pile up on the console in the hall.”
The comforting sense came from French consoler, to console or comfort. French also used console for a bracket that holds something up, either because a bracket takes the weight off, or because brackets were carved with the figure of a consolateur, a consoler. Brackets held up tables against walls, the tables took the name, and by the 1880s an organ's bank of controls was a console too, with radio and television control desks following in the 1930s.
French
console — bracket
English, today
console
Built from
Borrowed from French console (“bracket”), from consoler (“to console, to comfort”). Sense of “bracket” either due to a bracket alleviating the load, or due to brackets being decorated with the Christian figure of a consolateur (“consoler”), itself perhaps a pun on the first sense (alleviating load). Originally used for the bracket itself, then for wall-mounted tables (mounted with a bracket), then for free-standing tables placed against a wall. Use for control system dates at least to 1880s for an “organ console”; use for electrical or electronic control systems dates at least to 1930s in radio, television, and system control, particularly as “mixer console” or “control console”, attached to an equipment rack. This was popularized in computers by mainframes such as the IBM 704 (1954) in terms such as “operator’s console” or “console typewriter”, and then generalized to any attached equipment, particularly for user interaction. The automotive sense harks back to earlier use as “support”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA