Other forms: levers, levering
A lever is a bar you push down at one end so that the other end lifts. The handbrake between the car seats, the long metal bar you slide under a paving slab, the handle you yank on a fruit machine.
Levers sit inside most machines: the brake lever on a bike, the gear lever in a car, the little arm in a toilet cistern. As a verb you lever things — lever the lid off a paint tin with a screwdriver, lever yourself out of a low chair with both arms. Push at one end and the load moves at the other: that is the whole idea, and it is where leverage comes from, the extra power a good position gives you. The two pronunciations are both correct — LEE-ver in Britain, LEV-er in America. A lever is not a switch: a switch flicks, a lever swings through a distance.
1nouncrowbarA bar resting on a fixed point, so that pushing one end moves a heavy load at the other.~37%
“He forced a lever under the stone slab and heaved.”
2nounhandleA handle you pull or push to work a machine.~49%
“She pulled the lever and the barrier lifted.”
3verbleverTo move, lift or prise something using a bar or something like one.~2%
“They levered the crate open with a screwdriver.”
4noungivesSomething that gives you the power to make others act.~12%
“The unpaid loan gave the bank a useful lever.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
lever is a simple machine.
Lever came through Middle English from Old French leveor, a lifter, and behind that stands Latin levātor, from levō, to raise. The name is simply the job: the thing that raises. English took the same Latin word twice, so levator, the muscle that lifts, is this word's twin.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁lengʷʰ-
Latin
levātor — a lifter
French
levier
Old French
leveor
Middle English
lever
English, today
lever
Built from
From Middle English lever, levore, levour, from Old French leveor, leveur (“a lifter, lever (also Old French - and French levier)”), from Latin levātor (“a lifter”), from levō (“to raise”). a doublet of levator.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA