Other forms: hammers, hammered, hammering
A hammer is the heavy tool you hit nails with. A weighted head, a wooden handle, and a claw at the back for pulling nails out.
The verb goes with it and stretches a long way: you hammer a nail, rain hammers on a roof, and a team can be hammered five-nil. Athletics has the hammer throw, and auctions have the hammer that falls to end the bidding, which is why a lot goes under the hammer. There is a good idiom for real determination, since going at something hammer and tongs means with everything you have.
1nounhammerA tool with a heavy head used for driving in nails.
“He fetched a hammer from the shed.”
2verbstrikeTo strike repeatedly, or to defeat heavily.
“Someone was hammering on the front door.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
A hammer was a stone. Proto-Germanic hamaraz meant a tool with a stone head, from a root that meant simply stone, and the metal arrived later and kept the name.
Middle English
hamer
English, today
hammer
Built from
From Middle English hamer. From Middle English hamer, from Old English hamor, from Proto-West Germanic hamar, from Proto-Germanic hamaraz (“tool with a stone head”) (compare West Frisian hammer, Low German Hamer, Dutch hamer, German Hammer, Danish hammer, Swedish hammare). This is traditionally ascribed to Proto-Indo-European h₂eḱmoros, from h₂éḱmō (“stone”), but see hamaraz for further discussion. declare a defaulter on the stock exchange Originally signalled by knocking with a wooden mallet.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA