Other forms: found, finds, finding
Find is the moment the thing you were after turns up. You find your keys in yesterday's coat pocket, find a seat on a crowded train, find the shop shut when you finally get there.
Find also covers opinions and experience: I find him rude, she finds the work tiring, do you find this hard? A court finds a person guilty or not guilty. As a noun, a find is a lucky discovery — that second-hand bookshop was a real find. The past tense is found, and that brings a trap with it, because found is also its own separate verb meaning to set up an organisation: a company founded in 1890 was not discovered, it was started. Find out is the everyday way to say learn a fact you did not have before.
1verbfindTo get to something or someone you were looking for.~92%
“It took him ten minutes to find a parking space.”
synonyms: locate, track down
2verbchanceTo come across something by chance.~2%
“We did not expect to find a stream at the bottom of the garden.”
3verbparticularTo have a particular opinion of something, or a particular experience of it.~2%
“I find these meetings useful.”
4verbreachTo reach an official decision in a court of law.~2%
“The jury took two hours to find the defendant guilty.”
5noungoodSomething good or valuable that you discover.~2%
“That little café by the station was a real find.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Find is a travelling word. Old English findan came through Proto-Germanic from a Proto-Indo-European root *pent-, 'to go, to pass', the same root that gave English path, Latin pōns, 'bridge', and Ancient Greek πόντος, 'sea'. Finding something once meant going along until you came upon it.
Proto-Indo-European
*pent- — to go, pass; path bridge
Proto-Germanic
*finþaną
Proto-West Germanic
*finþan
Old English
findan
Middle English
finden
English, today
find
From Middle English finden, from Old English findan, from Proto-West Germanic finþan, from Proto-Germanic finþaną, a secondary verb from Proto-Indo-European pent- (“to go, pass; path bridge”). See also West Frisian fine, Low German finden, Dutch vinden, German finden, Danish finde, Norwegian Bokmål finne, Norwegian Nynorsk - and Swedish finna; also English path, Old Irish étain (“I find”), áitt (“place”), Latin pōns (“bridge”), Ancient Greek πόντος (“sea”), xcl հուն (“ford”), ae 𐬞𐬀𐬧𐬙𐬃, Sanskrit पथ (“path”), Proto-Slavic pǫtь. For the meaning development compare najьti > найти́, akin to jьti > идти́; находи́ть, нахо́дка, akin to ход, ходи́ть.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA