Other forms: louder, loudest
Loud means making a lot of sound — easy to hear from far away. A loud noise, loud music, don't be so loud.
It has a second sense about colour and pattern: a loud shirt, loud wallpaper. There it means aggressively bright, and it is a criticism. Applied to a person, loud describes somebody who talks too much and too noisily, and is also a criticism. The adverb is loudly, though loud is used adverbially in fixed phrases — say it out loud, laugh out loud. Note that aloud and out loud both mean not silently, and out loud is the commoner in speech.
1adjectiveloudMaking a lot of sound.
“The music was too loud to talk over.”
2adjectivecoloursOf colours or patterns, unpleasantly bright.
“He turned up in a very loud jacket.”
3adverbfixedLoudly, in fixed phrases.
“Read it out loud so everybody can hear.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
loud is a degree of sound.
Also accepted in games: noisy
Old English hlud comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to hear — the same root as listen, and as Greek kleos, fame. Something loud is something heard, and fame in the ancient world was simply being heard about.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱlew-
Middle English
loud
English, today
loud
Built from
From Middle English loud. From Middle English loude, loud, lud, from Old English hlūd (“loud, noisy, sounding, sonorous”), from Proto-West Germanic hlūd, from Proto-Germanic hlūdaz, hlūþaz (“heard”), from Proto-Indo-European ḱlewtos (“heard, famous”), from Proto-Indo-European ḱlew- (“to hear”). More at listen. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA