Other forms: heights
Height is how tall something is, from the bottom to the top. The pencil marks climbing the kitchen door frame, the number on your passport, the bar a high jumper has to clear.
It comes from high, but watch the spelling and the sound: height rhymes with bite and ends in a plain T, not heighth, however hard width and length pull you that way. Heights in the plural means high places, and a fear of them is a fear of heights. At the height of something is its peak moment: at the height of summer, at the height of his fame. The verb heighten means to increase, as in heightened security or heightened senses.
1nounheightHow tall something is, measured from bottom to top.
“Write your height and weight in the boxes on the form.”
2noundistanceThe distance of something above the ground.
“The plane levelled off at a height of ten thousand metres.”
3nounhighHigh places (in the plural).
“He will not go near a ladder; he has no head for heights.”
4nounstrongestThe strongest or busiest point of something.
“The shop was rebuilt at the height of the boom.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Height is high with an old noun-making ending stuck on the end: Old English heahthu, from Proto-Germanic *hauhitho, high plus -t. The pronunciation you would expect from that history has died out, and the modern one grew up as a variant, pulled into line by the adjective high. Depth, length and strength are built on the same pattern, which is exactly why so many people write heighth.
Old English
hīehþu
Middle English
heighte
English, today
height
Built from
From Middle English heighte, from Old English hīehþu. From Middle English heighte, heiȝþe, from Old English hēahþu, hēhþo, hīehþu (“height”), Proto-West Germanic hauhiþu, from Proto-Germanic hauhiþō (compare hauhaz). Equivalent to high + -t. The regular pronunciation is now obsolete (as with other words in -eight); the modern form developed early on, at first as a variant, by analogy with the underlying adjective. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA