Other forms: halves
A half is one of the two equal parts something splits into. Half an apple, half an hour, half the class with their hands up.
The plural is halves and the verb is halve: halve the potatoes, the price has halved. Word order trips learners up — you say half the cake and half an hour, with half in front of the article, never "the half of the cake". Half also softens a whole shelf of adjectives: half asleep, half full, half finished, half price. Time takes it as well, in half past six. And the l is silent, so the word comes out as "haf", rhyming with laugh.
1nounhalfOne of two equal parts of something.~47%
“Cut the melon and give him the bigger half.”
2adjectiveamountingAmounting to one of two equal parts.~43%
“We waited half an hour in the rain.”
3adverbdegreePartly; to some degree but not completely.~2%
“He was half asleep when the phone rang.”
4nounperiodsOne of the two periods a sports match is divided into.~8%
“They scored twice in the second half.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 28 sentences found in the wild and placed 23 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English healf meant half, but it also meant side or part, and that older sense is still breathing inside behalf: to act on behalf of someone is to act on their side. It comes from Proto-Germanic halbaz, with German halb, Dutch half and Swedish halv standing beside it, and halve is its own verb spun off the same word.
Middle English
half
English, today
half
From Middle English half. From Middle English half, halfe from Old English healf (“half”); as a noun, 'half', 'side', 'part', from Proto-West Germanic halb, from Proto-Germanic halbaz. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA