Other forms: fell, falls, falling, fallen
To fall is to drop downwards without meaning to. You fall off a bike, out of a tree, down the stairs; leaves fall, rain falls, prices fall. The one thing every use shares is that nobody chose it — that is what separates fall from jump.
The forms are irregular and they are the first hurdle: fall, fell, fallen. Note that fell is also a separate verb meaning to cut down a tree, so felled trees and fallen trees mean different things and only one of them involved an axe. From the physical drop come a great many figurative uses that a learner meets early: fall asleep, fall ill, fall in love, fall behind. In American English fall is also the season, where British English says autumn.
1verbfallTo drop down towards the ground without intending to.~19%
“He fell off the ladder and broke his wrist.”
2verbdeclineTo become lower in level, amount or price.~18%
“Temperatures fell sharply overnight.”
3verbpassTo pass into a state, usually one you did not choose.~2%
“She fell asleep before the end of the film.”
4nounactAn act of falling, or the distance fallen.~49%
“It was a nasty fall but nothing was broken.”
5nounautumnIn American English, autumn.~12%
“They visit every fall, when the leaves turn.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
fall is a downward movement.
The chain runs back through Old English feallan to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to collapse or be destroyed — so the earliest sense was not a gentle drop but a coming down for good. That older weight is still audible in a city that falls to an enemy, and in the fallen of a war.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₃elh₁- — to collapse, fall; to destroy
Proto-Germanic
*fallaną — to fall
Proto-West Germanic
*fallan — to fall
Old English
feallan — to fall, fail, decay, die, attack
Middle English
fallen
English, today
fall
Verb from Middle English fallen, from Old English feallan (“to fall, fail, decay, die, attack”), from Proto-West Germanic fallan (“to fall”), from Proto-Germanic fallaną (“to fall”), from Proto-Indo-European h₃elh₁- (“to collapse, fall; to destroy”). 2 Cognate with Scots faw (“to fall”), yol vale, vall, vole (“to fall”), frr faal, fåle (“to fall”), stq faale (“to fall”), West Frisian falle (“to fall”), bar foin (“to fall”), cim ballan, vallan (“to fall”), Dutch vallen (“to fall”), German and Low German fallen (“to fall”), lb falen (“to fall”), Yiddish פֿאַלן (“to fall”), Danish falde (“to fall”), Faroese, Icelandic and Swedish falla (“to fall”), Norwegian Bokmål falle (“to fall”), Norwegian Nynorsk falla, falle (“to fall”); also Latin aboleō (“to destroy; to die”), Ancient Greek ὄλλῡμι (“to destroy; to lose”), Armenian եղեռն (“crime; calamity, catastrophe; slaughter”), Lithuanian pùlti (“to fall; to attack, assault”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA