Other forms: given, gave, giving, gives
To give is to hand something over so that the other person has it. You give a friend a book, give the driver your ticket, give a pound to the man collecting outside the shop.
Two objects can follow it, in either order: give me the salt, or give the salt to me. The forms are irregular — gave in the past, given after have — and there is no such word as 'gived'. Half its working life is spent in phrases where nothing changes hands: give a speech, give someone a call, give it a try, give her a hug, give up smoking, give in to pressure, give away a secret. Give also means to bend or break under weight: the branch gave under his foot, and the old chair gives a little when you sit down. 'Give and take' is what any long friendship runs on.
1verbgiveTo hand something to someone so that it becomes theirs.~7%
“Give the letter to your mother when she gets in.”
2verbprovideTo provide or supply something.~78%
“The window gives a view over the whole valley.”
3verbperformTo perform the action named by the noun that follows.~11%
“She is giving a talk at the school on Friday.”
4verbbendTo bend or collapse under weight or pressure.~2%
“The ice gives a little at the edges.”
5verbdonateTo donate money or goods to a cause.~2%
“They give to the food bank every month.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 27 sentences found in the wild and placed 26 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Give is two words that fell together. English had ġiefan, which by the ordinary rules would have come down to us as yive, and the Vikings brought Old Norse gefa; the Norse form won, hard G and all. Both go back to Germanic *gebaną and to a Proto-Indo-European root *gʰebʰ- that meant, unhelpfully, both to give and to take.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰebʰ- — to give; to take
Proto-Germanic
*gebaną — to give
Old Norse
gefa — to give
Old English
ġefan
Middle English
given
English, today
give
Built from
From Middle English given, yeven, yiven, ȝiven, from merger of Old English ġefan, ġeofan, ġiefan, ġifan, ġiofan, ġyfan (“to give”) and Old Norse gefa (“to give”), from Proto-Germanic gebaną (“to give”), from Proto-Indo-European gʰebʰ- (“to give; to take”). yive, from yiven, of the same origin, from influence of Old Norse gefa. a doublet of 2 Cognate with yol gee, ye, yie, yive (“to give”), Scots gie (“to give”), frr gjiuwe, iiv, jiiw, jiw, jeewe (“to give”), West Frisian jaan (“to give”), gsw gë (“to give”), bar gebn (“to give”), gmw-cfr jevve (“to give”), cim gem, ghèban (“to give”), Dutch geven (“to give”), German geben (“to give”), lb ginn (“to give”), wym gaon (“to give”), Yiddish געבן (“to give”), Danish give (“to give”), ovd djävå (“to give”), Faroese geva (“to give”), Icelandic gefa (“to give”), Norwegian Bokmål gi (“to give”), Norwegian Nynorsk gi, giva, gje, gjeva, gjeve (“to give”), Swedish ge, gifva, giva (“to give”), Gothic 𐌲𐌹𐌱𐌰𐌽 (“to give”); also Greek κεφάλι, κεφαλή (“head”), Lithuanian gobti (“cover up; to grab, snatch”), Polish gabać (“to touch; to tap; to accost”), Serbo-Croatian ха̏бати, hȁbati (“to abrade, wear out”), Sanskrit गभस्ति (“shining”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA