Other forms: crossing, crossed, crosses
A cross is the shape two lines make when they cut through each other. The X you put in a box on a form, the + in a sum, the shape on top of a church.
As a verb, cross is one of the busiest words in English: you cross a road, cross a river, cross your legs, cross your arms, cross out a word you have written. British English has a use that catches learners out - cross means mildly annoyed, so don't be cross with me is a small complaint and nothing to do with churches. A cross is also a mixture of two breeds, a dog that is a cross between a collie and something with longer legs. In football, a cross is a ball hit in from the wing. Fingers crossed is a wish for luck, and if something crosses your mind you thought of it for a moment and moved on.
1nouncrossA shape made of two lines cutting through each other, used as a mark.~2%
“Put a cross in the box beside the name you choose.”
2verbgoTo go from one side of something to the other.~65%
“We crossed the river by a footbridge two miles upstream.”
3verblayTo lay one thing over another.~2%
“He sat back and crossed his arms.”
4verbdrawTo draw a line through writing to cancel it.~2%
“She crossed out the old address and wrote the new one underneath.”
5adjectiveannoyedMildly annoyed.~2%
“Mum was cross about the mud all down the hall.”
synonyms: annoyed, irritated
6nounanimalAn animal or plant bred from two different types.~2%
“The puppy is a cross between a spaniel and something much larger.”
7nounuprightAn upright post with a bar across it, used for execution, and the Christian symbol taken from it.~25%
“A stone cross stands at the top of the hill.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Cross took a long way round to reach English: Latin crux went into Old Irish as cros, from Irish into Old Norse as kross, and from Norse into Old English. It pushed out the native word rod, which now survives only in rood. The plain geometric sense - two lines meeting, with no religion attached - appears only in the late fourteenth century.
Middle English
cross
English, today
cross
From Middle English cross. From Middle English cross, cros, from Old English cros (“rood, cross”), from Old Norse kross, from Old Irish cros, from Latin crux (crucī). In this sense displaced native Middle English rode, from Old English rōd (“cross”); see rood. a doublet of crouch and crux. Compare Welsh croes, Irish crois. The sense of "two intersecting lines drawn or cut on a surface; two lines intersecting at right angles" without regard to religious signification develops from the late 14th century.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA