Other forms: laws
A law is a rule the whole country has to follow, made by a government and enforced by courts and police. Driving on the left, wearing a seatbelt, paying your tax by January.
With the in front of it, the law is the entire system and the people who run it: you break the law, you go to law, you study law for four years. Science borrows the same word for something quite different — the law of gravity, Newton's laws, the laws of thermodynamics — rules nobody wrote, which describe how the world behaves instead of telling anyone what to do. Watch the small words around it. Something is against the law, a person can be above the law, and Parliament passes a law. And the subject takes no plural: he works in law, never in laws.
1nounlawOne of the official rules a country makes and enforces.~8%
“Parliament passed a law banning the trade.”
2nounsubjectThe whole system of those rules, and the profession built on it.~88%
“She studied law for four years and never practised.”
synonyms: legislation
3nounstatementA statement of how some part of nature always behaves.~4%
“The law of gravity holds on every planet.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 126 of them on a sense (14 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Law is a Viking word. Old Norse lǫg meant things laid down — the plural of lag, a layer — from a root meaning to lie. A law is something laid down flat where everyone can see it, and Norse settlers carried the word to England, where it pushed the older English word out. One neat surprise: law and legal have nothing to do with each other. Legal comes from Latin lēx, by an entirely different road.
Middle English
lawe
English, today
law
Built from
From Middle English lawe. From Middle English lawe, laȝe, from Old English lagu (“law”), borrowed from Old Norse lǫg (“law”) literally “things laid down or firmly established”, originally the plural of lag (“layer, stratum, a laying in order, measure, stroke”), from Proto-Germanic lagą (“that which is laid down”), from Proto-Indo-European legʰ- (“to lie”). Cognate with Scots law (“law”), Icelandic lög (“things laid down, law”), Faroese lóg (“law”), Norwegian lov (“law”), Swedish lag (“law”), Danish lov (“law”), Finnish laki (“law”). Compare typologically distant cognate уложе́ние. Displaced native Old English ǣ and ġesetnes. More at lay. Not related to legal, nor to loi, ley, all of which ultimately derive from lēx, from *leǵ-.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA