Other forms: hits, hitting
To hit something is to bring your hand, or something in your hand, hard against it. A nail with a hammer, a ball with a bat, a fly on the window with a rolled-up magazine.
It runs a long way past violence. Cars hit trees, the temperature hits forty, sales hit a record, you hit send and the email is gone. Bad news hits you hard. As a noun it is a success — a hit song, a hit show — and online a hit is one visit to a page. The verb never changes shape: hit, hit, hit, so yesterday and tomorrow look the same. Set phrases are everywhere: hit the road, hit the sack, hit it off, hit the nail on the head.
1verbhitTo strike someone or something with your hand or an object.~24%
“He hit the ball straight over the fence.”
2verbcrashTo crash into something.~10%
“The van hit a bollard at the corner.”
3verbreachTo reach a level, number or place.~2%
“Prices hit their highest point in June.”
4verbaffectTo affect someone or something badly.~29%
“The closures hit the whole town.”
5nounpopularSomething very popular and successful.~33%
“The song was a hit in eleven countries.”
6verbpressTo press a key or a button.~2%
“Hit return and the machine does the rest.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 26 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense (6 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: strike
Hit began as a meeting rather than a blow. Old English hittan meant to come upon or fall in with, taken from Old Norse hitta, to strike or to meet, from Proto-Germanic hittijana, to come upon or find. The Scandinavian languages kept the gentler sense — Swedish hitta still means to find — while English hardened it into the blow.
Middle English
hitten
English, today
hit
From Middle English hitten. Middle English hitten (“to hit, strike, make contact with”), from Old English hittan (“to meet with, come upon, fall in with”), from Old Norse hitta (“to strike, meet”), from Proto-Germanic hittijaną (“to come upon, find”), from Proto-Indo-European kh₂eyd- (“to fall; fall upon; hit; cut; hew”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA