Other forms: delivered, delivering, delivers
To deliver is to bring goods or letters to the place they are going. Deliver a parcel, delivered on Tuesday, we deliver free.
It has grown a set of important extended senses. To deliver a speech is to give it. To deliver on a promise is to do what you said. To deliver results is to produce them, and in business writing deliver alone now means achieve. And to deliver a baby is what a midwife does. Note delivery, which covers all of them, and deliverable, which is management jargon for a thing that has to be produced.
1verbdeliverTo bring goods or letters to somebody.
“They deliver anywhere in the county.”
2verbpromisedTo do what you promised.
“The scheme has not delivered anything it said it would.”
3verbgiveTo give a speech or a verdict.
“She delivered the address without a note.”
4verbhelpTo help a baby to be born.
“The midwife who delivered both of them still lives there.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
deliver is a way of bringing or producing.
Old French delivrer is de- plus liberare, to set free. Delivering was releasing before it was carrying — which is why a mother is delivered of a child, and why deliver us from evil is asking to be let go rather than carried anywhere.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁lewdʰ-
Latin
dē
Old French
delivrer
Middle English
deliveren
English, today
deliver
Built from
From Middle English deliveren, from Anglo-Norman - and Old French delivrer, from Latin dē + līberō (“to set free”). Compare typologically dispatch, analyzable as dis- + impeach, from impedicō (also akin to impede).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA