Other forms: currents, currently
Current means the one you have now, the one in force at this moment. Your current address, the current price of milk, the current manager of the team.
As a noun it is a flow. Water moving in one steady direction is a current, and it is the thing that pulls a swimmer sideways down the beach while she thinks she is going straight out; air does the same over a hill, and electricity does it in a wire, which is why an electric current is measured in amps. There is a third, quieter use for feeling: a current of anger went round the room. Learn the set phrases — current affairs means the news, a current account is the bank account you spend from, and something that is up to date is current, while something that merely happens a lot is common. The two are not the same word.
1adjectivecurrentBelonging to the present moment; in force now.~61%
“Check the current price before you order.”
synonyms: present, existing, up to date
2nounflowWater or air moving steadily in one direction.~19%
“The current carried the boat under the bridge.”
3nounelectricElectricity moving through a wire.~18%
“The current in that cable is strong enough to light the street.”
4nounmovementA movement of feeling or opinion running through a group of people.~2%
“There was a current of unease in the hall.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 147 sentences found in the wild and placed 143 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
cur-RUN-t → RUN
You watch a river run straight through your kitchen. You drop one end of a wire in the water, and every light in the house comes on at once.
hooks ontorun
Latin currō meant to run. Old French made a present participle of it, corant — running — and English took that whole. So a current is water that is running, and the current year is the year now running. One picture, doing both jobs.
Old French
corant
Middle English
curraunt
English, today
current
Built from
From Middle English curraunt, from Old French corant. From Middle English curraunt, borrowed from Old French corant (French courant), present participle of courre (“to run”), from Latin currō (“to run”) (present participle currens). a doublet of courant.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA