Other forms: liked, likes, liking
If you like something, you find it pleasant and want more of it. You like a song enough to play it three times in a row, you like somebody's dog before you like them, you like your coffee strong and your mornings quiet.
Like is one of the busiest words in English, and the trap is that it does several jobs at once. As a verb it takes -ing for things in general (I like swimming) and would like for what you want now (I'd like a coffee, please). As a preposition it means similar to: she looks like her mother, it tastes like burnt toast, what is he like? In speech people use it as glue — it was, like, freezing — which is fine among friends and out of place in an essay. And a like is now something you can count: you tap the heart, the post gets likes, you liked her photo at two in the morning by accident.
1verblikeTo find something or someone pleasant.~2%
“She likes long walks and cold weather.”
synonyms: enjoy
2verbwantTo want something, in polite requests and offers.~2%
“I would like the soup, please.”
3verbphotoTo mark a post or photo online to show that you approve of it.~2%
“He liked every photo she posted that summer.”
4nounapprovalA mark of approval on a social media post.~2%
“The picture had four thousand likes by morning.”
5prepositionsimilarSimilar to; in the same way as.~90%
“The room smelled like old books.”
6conjunctioninformalAs; in the way that. (informal).~2%
“Do it like I showed you.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: enjoy
Old English līcian meant 'to please' as much as 'to like'. The word runs back through Proto-Germanic to a Proto-Indo-European root *leyg-, meaning image, likeness, similarity — which explains the other like, the one in she looks like her mother. Enjoying something and resembling something grew from the same seed.
Proto-Indo-European
*leyg- — image; likeness; similarity
Proto-Germanic
*līkāną
Proto-West Germanic
*līkēn
Old English
līcian — to like, to please
Middle English
liken
English, today
like
Verb from Middle English liken, from Old English līcian (“to like, to please”), from Proto-West Germanic līkēn, from Proto-Germanic līkāną, from Proto-Indo-European leyg- (“image; likeness; similarity”). Cognate with stq liekje (“to be similar, resemble”), West Frisian lykje (“to seem, appear, look”), Dutch lijken (“to seem”), Low German lieken (“to be like; resemble”), German gleichen (“to resemble”), Swedish lika (“to like; put up with; align with”), Norwegian like (“to like”), Icelandic - and Faroese líka (“to like”). Noun from Middle English like (“pleasure, will, like”), from the verb Middle English liken (“to like”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA