Other forms: efforts
Effort is the energy you put into something — the trying itself, not the result. Pushing at a stuck window, learning a hundred words a week, getting up at five to run in the dark.
You MAKE an effort, never do an effort, and you put effort INTO something. An effort can also be one single attempt: a good effort, his first effort at bread. Big organised pushes take the word too — the war effort, the relief effort, a fundraising effort. Effortless is the compliment every performer wants, meaning it looked like no work at all. And if something is an effort, it is simply tiring: those stairs are an effort now.
1nouneffortThe physical or mental energy you put into doing something.~17%
“It took a real effort to stay awake through the second half.”
2nounattemptAn attempt to do something.~26%
“His first effort at a soufflé came out flat.”
3nounorganisedAn organised activity by a group of people working towards one aim.~57%
“Half the village joined the clean-up effort.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 23 sentences found in the wild and placed 23 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
effort is energy put into doing something.
Old French esfort was made from esforcier, to force or exert, which goes back through Vulgar Latin exfortiō to Latin ex plus fortis, strong. An effort is strength pushed out of you. Middle French effort handed the noun to English with the strength still inside it.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰerǵʰ-
Latin
ex
Vulgar Latin
*exfortiō
Old French
esfort
Middle French
effort
English, today
effort
Built from
From Middle French effort, from Old French esfort, deverbal of esforcier (“to force, exert”), from Vulgar Latin exfortiō, from Latin ex + fortis (“strong”). Compare typologically усилие, úsilí, wysiłek, уси́лие (< sila).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA