Other forms: interests, interested, interesting
Interest is the pull that makes you want to know more. A book you carry from room to room, a conversation you lean into, a hobby that quietly eats your Sunday afternoons.
The money sense is just as common and completely separate in feel: interest is the extra you pay on top of what you borrowed, or the extra a bank pays you for leaving your savings there. Two per cent on a savings account, twenty on a credit card — that is the interest rate. From there the word spreads: your interests are your hobbies, an interest in a company is a share of it, and something done in your interests is done for your benefit. The verb interests, and the trap is the pair of adjectives that come off it. A film is interesting; you are interested. Say you are interesting in football and you have accidentally praised yourself.
1nouncuriosityThe feeling of wanting to know or learn more about something.~10%
“She listened with real interest and asked him to go back to the beginning.”
2nounmoneyMoney paid for the use of money — what a bank pays on savings or charges on a loan.~35%
“The loan looked cheap until he worked out the interest over ten years.”
3nounactivityAn activity you enjoy doing or learning about in your free time.~2%
“Under interests on the form he wrote climbing and old maps.”
5nounadvantageSomething that is to your advantage or benefit.~49%
“The court decided what was in the child's best interests.”
6verbwantTo make someone want to know more about something.~2%
“Nothing on the menu interests him except the soup.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
interest is a feeling of attention, or a charge on money.
Interest arrived through Old French interesse from Latin intersum — inter, between, plus sum, I am, built on the ancient root *h₁es- that also gives English is. What is between you and the world is what concerns you. That single idea holds the whole modern word together: what you care about, and what you have a stake in.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁es-
Latin
intersum
Medieval Latin
intersum
Old French
interesse
Middle English
interest
English, today
interest
From Middle English interest, from Old French interesse and interest (French intérêt), from Medieval Latin intersum, from Latin intersum.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA