Other forms: did, does, done, doing
Do is the widest verb in English: it stands in for any action at all. Do the washing-up, do your homework, do your hair, do nothing all afternoon.
Half its life is spent as a helper. Present-simple questions and negatives cannot be built without it — do you know him, I do not think so, she does not drive — and it adds force to a plain statement: I do like it, honestly. It also stands in for a verb already said, as in she reads faster than I do. Make and do split the work between them: you do a job or an activity, you make a thing that was not there before, so you do the dishes and make a cake. Britain has a noun as well, a do, meaning a party — a works do, a bit of a do.
1verbdoTo perform an action, a job or a task.~19%
“I do the shopping on Saturday morning.”
2verbhelperUsed as a helper verb to form questions and negatives, and to give a statement emphasis.~75%
“Do you want the last one, or shall I have it?”
3verbenoughTo be enough, or to be acceptable.~2%
“Two chairs will do; nobody else is coming.”
4verbworkTo work on something so that it looks right.~2%
“She does her hair the same way every morning.”
5nounpartyA party or social event. Informal, and British.~2%
“There is a do at the club on Saturday.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English don goes straight back to Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁-, which meant to put, to place, to make. That is about as far back as any English word can be traced, and English gave it the widest possible job. Do began as putting something somewhere, and ended up covering everything a person can perform.
Middle English
don
English, today
do
do-support From Middle English don. From Middle English don, from Old English don, from Proto-West Germanic dōn, from Proto-Germanic dōną, from Proto-Indo-European dʰeh₁- (“to put, place, do, make”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA