Other forms: couples, coupled, coupling
A couple is two people who are together — married, dating, or thirty years into a mortgage. The couple at the next table, the couple who moved in downstairs, the couple in the wedding photo squinting into the sun.
Most of the time you will hear couple doing something else entirely: a couple of days, a couple of quid, a couple of things I need to ask you. There it means two, or near enough two that nobody is counting. It wants of in front of a noun in British English, and American English drops it — a couple days. Couple is a verb as well, meaning to join two things: railway carriages are coupled together, and a report can couple one idea with another. One point of grammar catches people out — in British English a couple takes a plural verb, so the couple are moving to Spain.
1nounsmallTwo of something, or two or three — a small number nobody is counting.~21%
“I will be back in a couple of minutes.”
2nouncoupleTwo people who are together romantically.~77%
“The couple have been married for forty years.”
synonyms: pair
3verbrailTo join two things together.~2%
“The engine was coupled to the first carriage.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 166 sentences found in the wild and placed 148 of them on a sense (18 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin
cōpula
Old French
couple
Middle English
couple
English, today
couple
From Middle English couple, from Old French couple, from Latin cōpula. a doublet of copula.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA