Other forms: figures, figured, figuring
A figure is a written number, or the shape of a person's body. Sales figures, a six-figure sum, a slim figure.
The number sense covers digits and totals alike: double figures, the latest figures. The body sense is about outline — keep your figure, a fine figure of a man. A figure is also a person of note, a public figure, and a diagram in a book, Figure 4. Note figure of speech; figure out, meaning to work out; and that go figure is American for I cannot explain it.
1nounfigureA written number or amount.
“Can you check this figure? I think there's a mistake in the total.”
2nounshapeThe shape of a person's body.
“She has kept her slim figure by swimming every day.”
3verbworkTo work something out.
“I can't figure out how to turn this camera on.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
figure is a number, shape or person.
Latin figura means form or shape, from fingere, to mould. Fiction, feign and effigy come from the same moulding, so a figure is something shaped.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰeyǵʰ- — to mold, shape, form, knead
Old French
figure
Middle English
figure
English, today
figure
Built from
From Middle English figure, borrowed from Old French figure, from Latin figūra (“form, shape, form of a word, a figure of speech, Latin - a sketch, drawing”), from fingō (“to form, shape, mold, fashion”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰeyǵʰ- (“to mold, shape, form, knead”). Cognate with Ancient Greek τεῖχος, Sanskrit देग्धि, Old English dāg (“dough”). More at dough. a doublet of figura.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA