Other forms: hanging, hung, hanged, hangs
To hang something is to fix it at the top and let the rest of it swing free below. A coat on a hook, washing on a line, a picture on a nail, a bat under a beam.
It works both ways round: you hang the coat, and the coat hangs there. The trap is the past tense — pictures and coats were hung, but a person was hanged, and that second form belongs only to execution. Hang also covers what stays in the air without moving, so smoke hangs over a valley and silence hangs in a room after a question. In everyday speech the word goes light: hang on means wait, hang up ends a phone call, hang out means spend time with people, and to get the hang of something is to learn how it works. A computer that hangs has frozen, which is the same picture — stuck in mid-air, going nowhere.
1verbhangTo fix something at the top so that the rest of it swings free.~10%
“Hang your coat on the hook by the door.”
2verbfixedTo be fixed at the top and swing free.~10%
“A single bulb hangs from the ceiling of the hallway.”
3verbstayTo stay in the air without moving away.~2%
“Smoke hangs over the valley on still mornings.”
4verbkillTo kill someone by suspending them by the neck.~59%
“In those years a man could hang for stealing a sheep.”
5verbcomputer(of a computer or program) To stop responding.~19%
“The machine hangs every time I open that file.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
hang is a way of fixing something in place.
Hang is two Old English verbs melted into one: hon, to hang or be hanging, and hangian, to cause to hang, with a push from Old Norse hengja and hanga. That fusion is why the word works in both directions at once — you hang a coat, the coat hangs. The Proto-Indo-European root behind it all is *kenk-, to waver, to be in suspense, and the Sanskrit cousin means hesitates. Suspense was in the word long before any rope was.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱenk- — to waver, be in suspense
Proto-Germanic
*hanhaną
Proto-West Germanic
*hą̄han
Old English
hōn — to hang, be hanging
Middle English
hangen
English, today
hang
Built from
From Middle English hangen, hongen, from a fusion of Old English hōn (“to hang, be hanging”) and hangian (“to hang, cause to hang”), respectively from the transitive verb Proto-West Germanic hą̄han and the intransitive verb hangēn; also probably influenced by Old Norse hengja (“to suspend”) and hanga (“to be suspended”); all from Proto-Germanic hanhaną and hangāną, from Proto-Indo-European ḱenk- (“to waver, be in suspense”). See also Dutch hangen, Low German hangen and hängen, German hängen, Norwegian Bokmål henge, Norwegian Nynorsk henga; also Gothic 𐌷𐌰𐌷𐌰𐌽, hit 𒂵𒀀𒀭𒂵 (“to hang”), Sanskrit शङ्कते (“is in doubt, hesitates”), Latin cunctor (“to delay”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA