Other forms: insults, insulting, insulted
To insult someone is to say the thing that stings — not merely rude, but aimed. He insulted her cooking in front of her mother. A driver leans out at the lights and insults you for three seconds and then is gone.
Move the stress and you change the part of speech: you inSULT a person, and the thing you throw at them is an INsult. Insulting is the adjective — an insulting offer, insulting behaviour. The verb takes the person straight after it with no preposition: you insult your neighbour, never insult at him. The noun prefers to: an insult to the flag, an insult to your intelligence. And when something bad is followed by somebody being rude about it, English says that adds insult to injury.
1verbinsultTo say or do something that hurts somebody's pride.~23%
“He insulted the referee and was sent straight off.”
2nounaffrontA remark or an act that hurts somebody's pride.~77%
“The pay offer was taken as an insult.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 102 sentences found in the wild and placed 84 of them on a sense (18 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: offend
in-SULT → in SALT
You cut your hand on a glass in the kitchen. The man beside you looks down at the cut, picks up the salt, and empties the whole pot of it over your open hand.
hooks ontosalt
Latin saliō was to jump. Put in- on the front and you get īnsiliō, to leap upon somebody — and out of that came īnsultō, which meant both to keep jumping on a man and to taunt him. To a Roman those were one act. The root goes back to *sel-, to spring, and an insult is still the jumping about that follows the blow.
Proto-Indo-European
*sel- — to spring
Latin
īnsultō — to spring, leap or jump at or upon; to abuse, insult, revile, taunt
Middle French
insulter
English, today
insult
Built from
The verb is derived from Middle French insulter (modern French insulter (“to insult”)) or its etymon Latin īnsultō (“to spring, leap or jump at or upon; to abuse, insult, revile, taunt”), the frequentative form of īnsiliō (“to bound; to leap in or upon”), from in- + saliō (“to bound, jump, leap; to spring forth; to flow down”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European sel- (“to spring”)). The noun is derived from Middle French insult (modern French insulte (“insult”)) or its etymon Latin insultus (“insult, reviling, scoffing”), from īnsiliō (“to bound; to leap in or upon”); see above.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA