Other forms: higher, highest, highs
High means a long way up. Clouds, mountain tops, the shelf you need a chair to reach.
Use high for things that stand on the ground and for distance above it: a high wall, a high shelf, a plane flying high. Use tall for people, trees and narrow upright things — a tall man is never a high man, and that is the mistake to avoid. High also stretches over amounts and levels: high prices, high speed, a high temperature, a high risk, a high voice sitting near the top of its range. In informal speech, high means affected by a drug. As a noun it is a peak or a rush — an all-time high, the high that comes at the end of a race — and measurements put the number first: the fence is two metres high.
1adjectivehighFar above the ground, or measuring a lot from bottom to top.~20%
“The kitchen has a high ceiling and one small window.”
synonyms: lofty
2adjectiveamountGreat in amount, level or degree.~61%
“Rents here are high and still climbing.”
3adjectivesound(Of a sound or a voice) near the top of the musical range.~13%
“He can't reach the high notes any more.”
4adjectiveaffected(Informal) affected by a drug.~2%
“He was high and talking nonsense at four in the morning.”
5adverbheightAt or to a great height.~2%
“The kite went high over the field.”
6nounfeelingThe highest level something reaches, or a feeling of great excitement.~2%
“Sales hit an all-time high in July.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense (8 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
High runs back through Old English heah to Proto-Germanic hauhaz and a Proto-Indo-European root kewk-, which meant bending or crooked. A hill is a bulge in the ground, and the word for the bulge became the word for everything above your head. German hoch and Dutch hoog are the same word, barely disguised.
Proto-Indo-European
*kewk-
Middle English
heigh
English, today
high
From Middle English heigh. From Middle English high, heigh, heih, from Old English hēah (“high, tall, lofty, high-class, exalted, sublime, illustrious, important, proud, haughty, deep, right”), from Proto-West Germanic hauh (“high”), from Proto-Germanic hauhaz (“high”), from Proto-Indo-European kewk- (“to bend; crooked”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA