Other forms: hearts
Your heart is the organ in your chest that beats and pumps blood. A healthy heart, heart disease, my heart was racing.
It is also the seat of feeling in every metaphor English has: a broken heart, from the heart, take heart, lose heart, a change of heart, know it by heart. The heart of something is its centre — the heart of the city, the heart of the matter. Note heart attack and cardiac arrest, which are different things; and the heart shape, which resembles no actual heart at all.
1nounheartThe organ in the chest that pumps blood.~96%
“His heart was checked twice and was perfectly sound.”
2nounseatThe seat of feeling.~2%
“She said it from the heart and it landed badly.”
3nouncentreThe centre of something.~2%
“That is the heart of the matter and everything else is noise.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
heart is an organ, or a centre.
Old English heorte descends from Proto-Indo-European kerd, which also gives Latin cor — the source of cordial, courage, record and accord. Learning something by heart, remembering it in your cor, is the same idea as recording it.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱerd-
Middle English
herte
English, today
heart
Built from
From Middle English herte. From Middle English harte, heorrte, hert, herte, hierte, hirte, horte, huerte, hurte, from Old English heorte (“heart”), from Proto-West Germanic hertā, from Proto-Germanic hertô (“heart”), from Proto-Indo-European ḱḗr (“heart”), from ḱerd- (“heart”). a doublet of cardia; see also core. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA