Other forms: knees
The knee is the joint in the middle of your leg that bends when you sit. The biggest joint in the body, and one of the first to complain.
It gives English a whole set of postures and phrases: on your knees, bring somebody to their knees, knee-deep in water, knee-high to a grasshopper. Sport and surgery both revolve around it, since a knee injury ends more careers than almost anything else. As a verb, to knee somebody is to strike them with it. A knee-jerk reaction is an automatic one, named after the reflex a doctor tests.
1nounkneeThe joint between the thigh and the lower leg.
“He went down on one knee.”
Middle English
kne
English, today
knee
From Middle English kne. Middle English kne, from Old English cnēow, from Proto-West Germanic kneu, from Proto-Germanic knewą, from Proto-Indo-European ǵnéw-o-m, a derivative of ǵónu. See also West Frisian knibbel, Low German Knee, Knie, Dutch knie, German Knie, Danish knæ, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk kne, Swedish knä; also hit 𒄀𒉡, Latin genū, xto kanweṃ, txb keni, Ancient Greek γόνυ (“knee”), γωνία (“corner, angle”), Welsh glin (“knee”), xcl ծունր, ae 𐬲𐬥𐬎𐬨, Sanskrit जानु.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA