Other forms: fired, firing, fires
Fire is the hot, bright burning that gives off heat and light and eats whatever you feed it. Wood cracking in a grate, a match head flaring, the ring of blue under a pan.
The noun covers the useful kind and the destructive kind alike: a fire in the hearth, a fire that took the roof off the warehouse. You light a fire, put one out, set fire to something, and something catches fire. The verb has left the burning behind in two places. You fire a gun, and you fire questions at someone the same way; and you fire an employee, which means they lose their job that day. Potters fire clay in a kiln to harden it. Under fire means being shot at or heavily criticised, and someone on fire is either burning or playing brilliantly.
1nounfireThe hot bright burning that gives off heat and light.~22%
“They sat close to the fire until the wood ran out.”
2noundestroysA burning that destroys things.~60%
“A fire in the kitchen spread to the whole floor.”
3verbdismissTo tell an employee they must leave their job.~11%
“He was fired for lying on his timesheet.”
4verbshootTo shoot a gun, or send something off sharply.~5%
“The soldiers fired into the air to clear the square.”
5verbbakeTo bake clay hard in a kiln.~2%
“The pots are fired twice, once before glazing.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Fire runs straight back through Old English fyr and Proto-Germanic for to a Proto-Indo-European word peh-wr. The same ancestor stands behind German Feuer, Dutch vuur and West Frisian fjoer, which is why they all still look like relatives. Few English words have travelled so far with so little change.
Middle English
fyr
English, today
fire
From Middle English fyr. From Middle English fyr, from Old English fȳr (“fire”), from Proto-West Germanic fuir, from fuïr, a regularised form of Proto-Germanic fōr (“fire”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European péh₂wr̥. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA