Other forms: flights
A flight is one journey by aeroplane. Book a flight, the flight was delayed, a direct flight.
Flights have numbers, and flight time is how long the journey takes. A flight is also the act of flying, and a flight of stairs is one continuous run between landings. And flight means fleeing: take flight, put them to flight — which is a separate sense from a different Old English word. Note flight of fancy; fight or flight; and that a flight of birds and a flight of stairs are the same word by different routes.
1nounflightOne journey by aeroplane.
“Our flight to Rome leaves at seven in the morning.”
2nouncontinuousA continuous run of stairs, or the act of fleeing.
“She carried the heavy box up three flights of stairs.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
flight is a journey, run or fleeing.
Old English flyht, from fleogan, to fly, gives the aviation sense. The fleeing sense comes from a related but distinct word from fleon, to flee. English merged the spellings and kept both meanings.
Middle English
flight
English, today
flight
Built from
From Middle English flight. From Middle English flight, from Old English flyht (“flight”), from Proto-West Germanic fluhti (“flight”), derived from fleuganą (“to fly”), from Proto-Indo-European plewk- (“to fly”), enlargement of plew- (“flow”). Analyzable as fly + t (variant of -th). Cognate with West Frisian flecht (“flight”), Dutch vlucht (“flight”), German Flucht (“flight”) (etymology 2).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA