cough

UK/kɒf/US/kɔf/

verbA23 meanings Common in everyday speech and writing · #2,668 of 15,258mostly spoken

Other forms: coughs, coughed, coughing

A cough is that sharp bark from the throat when something is in the way — dust, smoke, a crumb gone down the wrong hole, or a chest full of a cold. You feel it building during the quiet part of a concert, you try to hold it in, and out it comes anyway.

Cough is a verb and a noun in equal measure: you cough, you have a cough, and the cough hangs about for a fortnight after the rest of the cold has cleared. It brings a small shelf of vocabulary with it — cough medicine, cough sweets, a dry cough, a chesty cough. An engine coughs too, when it turns over and fails to catch. And there is the informal cough up, which is what you do when somebody finally makes you hand over money you were hoping to keep. Then the spelling: cough looks like though and bough and rhymes with neither. It rhymes with off.

Definitions of cough

1verbsoundTo push air out of your throat with a sudden sharp noise.A2~21%
“He coughed twice and put a hand over his mouth.”
2nouncoughThat sound, or the illness that keeps making you produce it.B1~77%
“She has had a cough since Christmas.”
3verbengineOf an engine, to make a rough broken noise instead of starting properly.B1~2%
“The old van coughed twice and died at the lights.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 110 sentences found in the wild and placed 105 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Remember it

COUGH → COFF, as in COFFee

A cup of coffee is put down in front of you with black smoke coming off the top. You take one drink, and the whole room turns round at the noise you make.

hooks ontocoffee

Phrases it lives in

cough up — hand over money or information you would rather keep

Also practised as

verbTo push air out of the throat with a sharp noise.

Where it comes from

Cough goes back through Middle English coughen to Old English cohhian and a Proto-West Germanic root *kuh-, to cough. Past that the record stops with a single word: onomatopoeic. There is no older story, because the word is the noise itself, written down. Only the letters have drifted since.

Proto-West Germanic
*kuh- — to cough
Old English
*cohhian
Middle English
coughen
English, today
cough

Built from

coghen · Middle English — to cough; to vomit

From Middle English coughen, coghen (“to cough; to vomit”)coghe, couhen, couwhen, couwe, couwen, couȝen, couȝhen, couȝtthe, couȝwen, coȝen, cowen, cowff, cowghen, cowhen, cowȝen, koghe, kouȝen, kowen, from Old English cohhian (compare Old English cohhetan (“to bluster; to riot; to cough (?)”)), from Proto-West Germanic kuh- (“to cough”), ultimately of onomatopoeic origin. 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Body & Health, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 7 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

cough in the wild

There is no good evidence that cough medicines prevent or reduce the duration of a cold.
Common cold
Following a fit of coughing, a high-pitched whoop sound or gasp may occur as the person breathes in.
Whooping cough
The cough may be so hard that it causes fatigue, vomiting, and rib fractures.
Whooping cough
Frequent coughing usually indicates the presence of a disease.
Cough
In other words, it is the airway bleeding, and does not necessarily involve coughing.
Hemoptysis

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Definitions of cough

1verbsoundTo push air out of your throat with a sudden sharp noise.A2~21%

“He coughed twice and put a hand over his mouth.”

2nouncoughThat sound, or the illness that keeps making you produce it.B1~77%

“She has had a cough since Christmas.”

3verbengineOf an engine, to make a rough broken noise instead of starting properly.B1~2%

“The old van coughed twice and died at the lights.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 110 sentences found in the wild and placed 105 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.