Other forms: guests, guested, guesting
A guest is somebody you invite into your home. Coats taken at the door, the good plates out, the spare bed made up with the sheets that come out twice a year.
Hotels use the word for anyone staying the night and restaurants for anyone eating; it covers weddings, parties and dinner tables too — a guest list, a wedding guest, the guest of honour at the top of the table. Television and music borrowed it: a guest on a talk show, a guest appearance, a guest singer on a track, and as a verb, she guested on the album. Guest sits opposite host, and the pair of them describe the whole arrangement. Say be my guest and you are telling somebody to go ahead and help themselves — the borrowed pen, the last chair, the sofa for the night.
1nounguestA person you have invited to your home or to an event.~17%
“Twelve guests came to dinner and nobody left before midnight.”
synonyms: visitor
2nounstayingA person staying at a hotel or eating at a restaurant.~16%
“Guests are asked to leave their keys at reception.”
3nounperformerA performer or speaker who appears on a show they are not part of.~42%
“Tonight's guest is a novelist nobody in the room has read.”
4verbrecordingTo appear as a guest on a show or a recording.~25%
“She guested on two tracks of the album.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense (6 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
guest is a person who has been invited.
Also accepted in games: visitor
Guest and host are the same word. Old Norse gestr shouldered aside the Old English ġiest, and both go back to Proto-Germanic *gastiz and to a Proto-Indo-European word *gʰóstis, which meant stranger, guest and host all at once, because what it really named was a relationship: two people who owe each other hospitality. English later borrowed the Latin descendant of that same root and got host.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰóstis — stranger, guest, host, someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality
Proto-Germanic
*gastiz
Old Norse
gestr
Middle English
gest
English, today
guest
From Middle English gest, from Old Norse gestr, which replaced or was merged with Old English ġiest, both from Proto-Germanic gastiz, from Proto-Indo-European gʰóstis (“stranger, guest, host, someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality”). a doublet of host, from Latin. 1 West-Germanic:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA