Left is the side your heart is on. The hand most people write with less, the lane you drive in if you are British, the pocket where the keys always end up.
It works three ways with no change of form: left hand is an adjective, turn left is an adverb, on your left is a noun. Politics claims it too — the left, left-wing, a party moving to the left — and those words carry heat. The real trap is a different word wearing the same spelling: left is the past tense of leave, so 'she left her keys on the left of the sink' holds two unrelated words in one line. Left-handed is the adjective for a person, and a leftie is the casual noun for one. Whatever is left over after dinner belongs to leave, not to this side of the body.
1adjectiveleftOn the side of the body where the heart is.~56%
“He writes with his left hand and cuts with his right.”
2noundirectionThe left side or direction.~14%
“The kitchen is on your left as you come in.”
3adverbtowardsTowards the left side.~2%
“Turn left at the traffic lights and keep going.”
4nounpoliticalThe political groups that push for equality and change, taken together.~28%
“The party moved to the left after the election.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense (6 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
left is a side or direction.
In Old English, left meant weak, clumsy or foolish; it survives in lyftadl, their word for palsy. So the name of the side began as a verdict on the hand: the weak one. Further back sits a Proto-Germanic form connected with lopping something off, and behind that a Proto-Indo-European sense of hanging limply.
Proto-Indo-European
*lewbʰ-
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)lewp-
Proto-Germanic
*luft-
Old English
left
Middle English
left
English, today
left
Built from
From Middle English left, luft, leoft, lift, lyft, from Old English left, lyft (“weak, clumsy, foolish”), attested in Old English lyftādl (“palsy, paralysis”), from Proto-Germanic luft-, from lubjaną (“to castrate, lop off”) (compare dialectal English lib, West Frisian lobje, Dutch lubben), from Proto-Indo-European (s)lewp-, (s)lup- (“hanging limply”). Compare Scots left (“left”), frr lefts, leeft, leefts (“left”), West Frisian lofts (“left”), obsolete Dutch lucht, leftsch, lefts, lefs (“left”), dialectal Dutch loof (“weak, worthless”), archaic Low German lucht (“left”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA