Other forms: meaning, meant, meanest, meaner
To mean something is to carry it as your message: what a word stands for, or what you had in your head when you did something. What does this sign mean? I meant to call you. Red means stop.
Mean is also an adjective doing two separate jobs. A mean person will not share — mean with money, mean with praise, counting the biscuits before the guests arrive. And a mean person is cruel: a mean thing to say, mean to his little sister, which is the sense every child in an English playground uses. In maths the mean is the average — add them up, divide by how many. The past tense is meant, which is spelled oddly and rhymes with sent. And keep two patterns apart: mean to do something is intention, mean doing something is consequence — a strike means walking to work.
1verbsignifyTo have a particular sense, or to have a particular intention.~53%
“I did not mean to wake you.”
2adjectiveunkindUnkind on purpose; enjoying making other people feel small.~2%
“That was a mean thing to say to her.”
3adjectivemeanUnwilling to give or spend anything.~2%
“He is too mean to buy a round.”
4nounaverageThe average of a set of numbers.~43%
“The mean of 4, 6 and 8 is 6.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 116 of them on a sense (24 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Three different words wore down into one spelling. The verb is Old English mǣnan, to mean and to complain — moan is its brother. The unkind one is ġemǣne, common, public, belonging to everybody: what belonged to the crowd came to sound low and then nasty, the same slide that turned Latin vulgus, the mob, into vulgar. The third is Latin medius, middle, twin of median, and it is the mean in a set of numbers — the one in the middle of them all.
Proto-Indo-European
*meyn- — to think
Proto-Germanic
*mainijaną — to mean, think; complain
Proto-West Germanic
*mainijan
Old English
mǣnan — to mean, complain
Middle English
menen — to intend; remember; lament; comfort
English, today
mean
From Middle English menen (“to intend; remember; lament; comfort”), from Old English mǣnan (“to mean, complain”), Proto-West Germanic mainijan, from Proto-Germanic mainijaną (“to mean, think; complain”), from Proto-Indo-European meyn- (“to think”), or perhaps from Proto-Indo-European meyno-, extended form of Proto-Indo-European mey-. Germanic cognates include West Frisian miene (“to deem, think”) (Old Frisian mēna (“to signify”)), Dutch menen (“to believe, think, mean”) (Middle Dutch menen (“to think, intend”)), German meinen (“to think, mean, believe”), Old Saxon mēnian. Indo-European cognates include Old Irish mían (“wish, desire”) and Polish mienić (“to signify, believe”). Non-Indo-European cognates include Finnish mainita (“to mention”), Finnish meinata (“to mean, to plan, to intend”) Estonian mainima (“to mention”), se máinnastit (“to tell”). Related to moan.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA