Other forms: grounds
The ground is the surface of the earth you stand on outside. On the ground, above ground, the ground was frozen. It takes the almost always, and it is uncountable in this sense.
From that come a set of countable uses: a football ground is a stadium, and grounds are the land round a large building or the sediment at the bottom of a coffee pot. Grounds also means reasons — grounds for concern, grounds for divorce — and that is a formal and very common use. Note that ground is also the past of grind, which is a different word entirely: ground coffee has been through a grinder and has nothing to do with the earth.
1noungroundThe surface of the earth.~52%
“The ground was too hard to dig.”
2nounreasonA reason or basis for something.~5%
“There are no grounds for a complaint.”
3nounareaA large area used for a sport.~41%
“The ground holds twenty thousand.”
4nounlandThe land around a large building.~2%
“The grounds are open to the public at weekends.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
ground is the earth's surface, or a basis.
Old English grund meant the bottom of something — the seabed, the base of a wall — before it meant the earth's surface. The sense of a reason comes from the same picture: the grounds of an argument are what it rests on.
Middle English
ground
English, today
ground
From Middle English ground. From Middle English ground, from Old English grund, from Proto-West Germanic grundu, from Proto-Germanic grunduz. Cognate with West Frisian grûn, Dutch grond and German Grund. to punish Compare (bring) down to earth, come down to earth.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA