Other forms: minted, mints, minting
Mint is the sharp, cool-tasting herb in tea, in lamb sauce and in toothpaste. A bunch of it standing in a glass of water on the windowsill; one leaf crushed between your fingers and the smell all over your hand.
A mint is also a small hard sweet with that taste, passed round after dinner. Mint green is the pale cool green named after the leaf, the colour of a thousand old kitchen tins. Then comes a separate word with the same spelling: a mint is where a country makes its coins, and to mint is to make them — which gives minting a new phrase, in mint condition (unused, fresh as a new coin) and worth a mint. Peppermint and spearmint are the two kinds you meet most, and gardeners grow mint in a pot because in open ground it spreads like a weed.
1nounmintA herb with cool, sharp-tasting leaves, used in cooking and drinks.~33%
“She tore up some mint and dropped it into the jug of water.”
2nounsmallA small hard sweet flavoured with mint.~6%
“There was a bowl of mints by the door of the restaurant.”
3adjectivecolourOf a pale, cool green colour.~2%
“The kitchen walls were painted mint green.”
4nounplaceThe place where a country's coins are made.~33%
“The coin was struck at the royal mint in 1887.”
5verbinventTo make coins; to invent a new word or phrase.~26%
“The bank minted a million new one-pound coins.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
The mint that makes money is named after a temple. Latin monēta was the temple of Juno Moneta in Rome, where coins were struck, and it came to mean both the coin and the place; Old English took it as mynet, a coin. English money comes from the same Latin word, so mint and money are twins. The herb is a different word that happens to look identical.
Proto-Indo-European
*men- (think)
Latin
monēta — place for making coins, coined money
Proto-West Germanic
*munit
Old English
mynet — coin
Middle English
mynt
English, today
mint
Built from
From Middle English mynt, munet (“money, coin”), from Old English mynet (“coin”), from late Proto-West Germanic munit, from Latin monēta (“place for making coins, coined money”), from the temple of Juno Moneta (named for Monēta mother of the Muses), where coins were made. a doublet of money and manat. The verb is from the noun; Old English mynetian (“to mint”) is a parallel formation.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA