glide

UK/ˈɡlaɪd/US/ˈɡlaɪd/

verbB23 meanings Common in everyday speech and writing · #5,457 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: gliding, glides, glided

To glide is to move along smoothly, with nothing visibly pushing. A swan crosses the pond and its body never rocks; a bird holds its wings out flat and does not beat them once; the heavy drawer shuts itself the last inch.

Glide belongs to anything that moves as though the ground were oiled. Dancers glide across the floor, a boat glides under the bridge, and a plane can glide with its engines dead, which is all a glider ever does. Used about a person it says something about them: she glided into the room means calm, unhurried, and probably being watched. Anything that jerks, bumps or hurries cannot glide, so keep it away from run, stumble and rush. In music and in phonetics a glide is the slur from one note or one sound into the next.

Definitions of glide

1verbwalkTo move smoothly and quietly, with no visible effort.B2~26%
“The boat glided under the bridge without a sound.”
synonyms: slide, float, drift
2verbglideTo fly without engine power, or with the wings held out and still.B1+~63%
“The gull glided along the cliff for a full minute.”
3noununbrokenA smooth unbroken movement from one point, note, or sound to the next.C1~11%
“There is a glide between the two notes rather than a jump.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 144 sentences found in the wild and placed 117 of them on a sense (27 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Remember it

GLIDE → a SLIDE

A boy sits at the top of a long silver slide in the park and lets go. The slide is wet from the rain, and he goes all the way to the bottom in one smooth run, feet first, arms out, quiet as a fish.

hooks ontoslide

Also practised as

verbTo move smoothly and without effort.

Where it comes from

Old English glīdan, and hardly a letter has moved in a thousand years. The whole North Sea says it much the same way — glijden in Dutch, gleiten in German, glida in Swedish, glide in Danish — which is a fair measure of how old it is. There is no Latin anywhere near this word.

Proto-Indo-European
*gʰleydʰ-
Proto-Germanic
*glīdaną
Proto-West Germanic
*glīdan
Old English
glīdan
Middle English
gliden
English, today
glide

From Middle English gliden, from Old English glīdan, from Proto-West Germanic glīdan, from Proto-Germanic glīdaną, from Proto-Indo-European gʰleydʰ-. Cognate with West Frisian glide, glydzje, Low German glieden, Dutch glijden, German gleiten, Norwegian Nynorsk gli, Danish glide, Swedish glida, Finnish liitää.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, Birds

First appears in chapter 31 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

glide in the wild

In music, a glissando is a glide from one pitch to another ().
Glissando
In other contexts, it refers to discrete, stepped glides across notes, such as on a piano.
Glissando
The term "glide bombing" does not refer to the use of glide bombs, but a style of shallow-angle dive bombing.
Glide bomb
However, some aircraft with lifting bodies and animals such as the flying snake can achieve gliding flight without any wings by creating a flattened surface underneath.
Gliding flight
Other types of movement occurring on solid surfaces include twitching, gliding and sliding, which are all independent of flagella.
Bacterial motility

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

glider

Definitions of glide

1verbwalkTo move smoothly and quietly, with no visible effort.B2~26%

“The boat glided under the bridge without a sound.”

synonyms: slide, float, drift

2verbglideTo fly without engine power, or with the wings held out and still.B1+~63%

“The gull glided along the cliff for a full minute.”

3noununbrokenA smooth unbroken movement from one point, note, or sound to the next.C1~11%

“There is a glide between the two notes rather than a jump.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 144 sentences found in the wild and placed 117 of them on a sense (27 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.