Other forms: kissing, kisses, kissed
To kiss is to touch somebody with your lips. Kiss her goodbye, they kissed, a kiss on the cheek.
The number and placement of social kisses varies enormously by country, which is the source of a great deal of doorstep confusion. As a noun, a kiss is one such touch, and kisses written as x on a message is a British and Irish habit. Note kiss of life, meaning mouth-to-mouth resuscitation; kiss goodbye to something, meaning to lose it for good; and the kiss of death, meaning something that ruins a plan by seeming to help it.
1verbkissTo touch somebody with your lips.~22%
“She kissed him on the cheek and got on the train.”
2nountouchA touch with the lips.~78%
“She gave her little son a kiss goodnight and turned off the light.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
kiss is a touch of the lips.
Old English cyssan is Germanic and probably imitative of the sound. Most languages have a kiss word built the same way, which is why they resemble one another without being related.
Middle English
kissen
English, today
kiss
From Middle English kissen. From Middle English kissen, kussen, from Old English cyssan (“to kiss”), from Proto-West Germanic kussijan, from Proto-Germanic kussijaną (“to kiss”). Cognates include stq küsje, Dutch kussen, German Low German küssen, German küssen, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål kysse, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish kyssa. Compare ku-, kus- (probably imitative of the sound), with descendants including κύσσω, poetic form of κύσω* (“to kiss”), and hit.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA