Other forms: cursed, curses, cursing
A curse is words said over somebody to bring harm down on them. The witch's curse in the story, a curse on this house, a curse muttered at whoever built these stairs. You say it out loud, and you mean it.
The verb carries both halves of that. To curse somebody is to wish real harm on them; to curse on its own is simply to swear, and he cursed under his breath and started the engine again. A curse is also any long run of bad luck that people pin on a cause: the curse of the pharaohs, the curse that has followed a football club for eighty years. The adjective is cursed. Its natural opposite is blessing, which is why so much writing pairs them — fame turned out to be a blessing and a curse. Watch the prepositions: you put a curse on somebody, and you curse at the traffic.
1nouncurseWords spoken over somebody to bring harm on them.~42%
“The old story says a curse was put on the house.”
synonyms: hex, jinx
2verbspeechTo swear — to use rude or angry words.~2%
“He cursed quietly and started the engine again.”
3nounlastingSomething that brings lasting trouble or bad luck.~50%
“Fame turned out to be a curse as much as a gift.”
4verbharmTo call down harm on somebody.~6%
“She cursed the man who had sold her the car.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 114 sentences found in the wild and placed 65 of them on a sense (49 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Almost every English word can be followed back into Latin, Norse or German. This one cannot. Old English had cors, already meaning a curse, and nobody has ever found where it came from — the word turns up fully formed, with no family and no history behind it.
Old English
cors
Middle English
curse
English, today
curse
Built from
From Middle English curse, kors, cors, curs, from Old English cors, curs (“curse”), of unknown origin.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA