Other forms: fighting, fought, fights
To fight is to use force or hard words against somebody. Fight back, they were fighting, fight for your rights.
The past tense is fought. Fight with can mean fight alongside or fight against, which is ambiguous and worth avoiding. Fight for means to struggle to obtain, and fight off means to resist successfully. As a noun, a fight is both a physical struggle and an argument: they had a fight about it. Note picking a fight, a fighting chance, fight tooth and nail, and put up a fight.
1verbfightTo use force or hard words against somebody.~36%
“The two boys started to fight in the playground, and a teacher pulled them apart.”
2verbachieveTo struggle to achieve or resist something.~9%
“She fought for that change for most of her career.”
3nounphysicalA physical struggle or an argument.~55%
“There was a fight outside at about eleven.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 22 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
fight is a struggle.
Old English feohtan descends from a root meaning to comb or pluck — the same distant source as Latin pectere, to comb. The connection is to seizing and tearing at something, which fits fighting better than it fits hair.
Proto-Indo-European
*peḱ- (pluck)
Proto-Indo-European
*peḱ- — to comb, shear
Proto-Germanic
*fehtaną — to comb, tease, shear, struggle with
Proto-West Germanic
*fehtan — to fight
Old English
feohtan — to fight, combat, strive
Middle English
fighten — to fight
English, today
fight
From Middle English fighten (“to fight”), from Old English feohtan (“to fight, combat, strive”), from Proto-West Germanic fehtan (“to fight”), from Proto-Germanic fehtaną (“to comb, tease, shear, struggle with”), from Proto-Indo-European peḱ- (“to comb, shear”). Cognate with Scots fecht (“to fight”), West Frisian fjochtsje, fjuchte (“to fight”), Dutch vechten (“to fight”), Low German fechten (“to fight”), German fechten (“to fence”), Danish fægte (“to fence, to fight (using blade weapons)”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk fekte (“to fence”), Swedish fäkta (“to fence, to fight (using blade weapons), to wave vigorously (and carelessly) with one's arms”), Latin pectō (“comb, thrash”), Albanian pjek (“to hit, strive, fight”), Ancient Greek πέκω (“comb or card wool”). Related also to Old English feht (“wool, shaggy pelt, fleece”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA