Other forms: listed, lists, listing
A list is things written one under another — a shopping list, a guest list, a to-do list. The verb follows straight from it: the label lists every ingredient.
There is a second, unrelated list that means to lean over to one side and stay there, used almost only of ships: the ferry was listing badly. You are unlikely to need it outside a news report about an accident at sea, and it is worth knowing only so it does not confuse you when it appears.
1nounitemsA set of names or things written one under another.~72%
“Add milk to the list.”
2verbwriteTo write things one under another, or to name them in order.~26%
“The label lists every ingredient.”
3verblistTo lean over to one side and stay there.~2%
“The ship was listing badly by dawn.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 23 sentences found in the wild and placed 23 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
A list was a strip before it was a catalogue. Old English līste meant a hem, an edge or a border, and names written down the edge of a page turned the strip into an inventory.
Proto-Indo-European
*leys- — to trace, track
Proto-West Germanic
*līstā
Medieval Latin
lista
Old French
liste
Old English
līste — hem, edge, strip
Middle English
list
English, today
list
Built from
From Middle English list, liste (“band, stripe; hem, selvage; border, edge, rim; list, specification; barriers enclosing area for jousting, etc.”), from Old English līste (“hem, edge, strip”), or Old French liste, listre (“border; band; strip of paper; list”), or Medieval Latin lista, all from Proto-West Germanic līstā, possibly from Proto-Indo-European leys- (“to trace, track”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA