Other forms: floats, floated, floating
To float is to sit on the surface of water instead of sinking. A cork in a bucket, ice knocking about in a glass, a child on their back in the sea with their ears under and their face in the sun.
Things float in air as well — a balloon, dust in a beam of sunlight, a plastic bag going up the street. The verb takes on for a liquid and in for air: the raft floats on the water, dust floats in the light. As a noun it is the decorated lorry in a parade, and the cash a shop keeps in the till at opening. Money floats twice more: a company floats when it first sells shares to the public, and a currency floats when nobody fixes its rate. Then the loose, useful sense — you float an idea to see who objects, which lets you put something forward without owning it yet.
1verbfloatTo rest on the surface of a liquid without sinking.~60%
“Wood floats and iron sinks.”
synonyms: drift
2verbdriftTo move slowly and lightly through the air.~32%
“A balloon floated over the houses.”
3verbputTo put an idea forward to see how people react to it.~2%
“He floated the idea of a four-day week.”
4noundecoratedA decorated vehicle driven slowly in a parade.~6%
“The carnival float was covered in paper flowers.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 138 sentences found in the wild and placed 52 of them on a sense (86 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Float is Old English — flotian, to float — sitting on a root, *plew-, that meant to float, to swim and to fly all at once, which is why floating in water and floating in air are one word here. Flow and fleet grew from the same root: a fleet is a set of floating things. Old English also had flota, which meant a boat and a sailor both.
Proto-Indo-European
*plew-
Proto-Indo-European
*plewd-
Proto-Germanic
*flutōną — to float
Proto-West Germanic
*flotōn
Old English
flotian — to float
Middle English
floten
English, today
float
Built from
From Middle English floten, from Old English flotian (“to float”), from Proto-West Germanic flotōn, from Proto-Germanic flutōną (“to float”), from Proto-Indo-European plewd-, plew- (“to float, swim, fly”). Compare flow, fleet.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA