Other forms: insisted, insists, insisting
To insist is to say something firmly and keep saying it after people push back. The friend who insists on paying for dinner, the child who insists he is not tired, the doctor who insists you take the whole week off.
Insist takes on before a noun or an -ing form: he insisted on driving, she insisted on an apology. Before a clause it takes that — I insist that you keep the change. What it never takes is a person plus to, so you cannot insist someone to leave; the words for that are tell, ask or make. The noun is insistence and the adjective is insistent, which fits a knocking on the door as well as it fits a person. And the word has two flavours worth separating: insisting on something is demanding it, while insisting that something is true is simply refusing to back down.
1verbinsistTo say firmly that something must happen or be done.~75%
“She insisted on paying for the taxi.”
2verbmaintainTo keep saying that something is true, even when others doubt it.~25%
“He insists that he posted the letter on Tuesday.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
insist is a way of speaking.
Insist reached English by two roads at once. One is Middle French insister, from Latin insisto. The other runs backwards out of insistence, a noun English already had, with the verb carved out of the longer word rather than borrowed whole.
Latin
īnsistō
Middle French
insister
English, today
insist
Partly from Middle French insister, from Latin īnsistō; and partly from a a back-formation from insistence. Compare typologically from the same PIE root Bulgarian настоявам, Russian наста́ивать.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA