Other forms: hugs, hugging, hugged
To hug someone is to put your arms round them and hold them close. A hug at the airport gate, a child running at your legs, two friends who have not seen each other in a year.
The noun is the same word: give her a hug, one last hug at the door. Objects get hugged too, and there it means to stay very close to something — a road that hugs the coast, a dress that hugs the body, hug the wall on the left. The spelling doubles the g: hugged, hugging, a hugger. A bear hug is a very tight one, and a group hug is what somebody shouts when everything has just gone right. Embrace means the same thing and sounds formal and slightly literary; hug is what people actually say.
1verbhugTo put your arms around someone and hold them close.
“She hugged him at the gate and told him to write.”
2nounactThe act of holding someone close in your arms.
“He gave his sister a hug and got into the car.”
3verbstayTo stay very close to something along its edge.
“The path hugs the river for two miles.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: embrace
The word turns up as hugge in the 1560s, meaning to clasp with the arms, and it probably comes from two directions at once: huck, to crouch and huddle down, and Old Norse hugga, to comfort or console. That Norse verb came from hugr — mind, heart, thought. On that reading a hug started as consolation rather than a greeting.
Proto-Germanic
*hugiz — mind, thought, sense
Old Norse
hugga — to comfort, console
English, today
hug
Built from
From earlier hugge (“to embrace, clasp with the arms”) (1560), probably representing a conflation of huck (“to crouch, huddle down”) and Old Norse hugga (“to comfort, console”), from hugr (“mind, heart, thought”), from Proto-Germanic hugiz (“mind, thought, sense”), cognate with Icelandic hugga (“to comfort”), Old English hyġe (“thought”) (whence high (Etymology 2)).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA