Other forms: moved, moving, moves
Move is what you do when you leave one spot and end up in another. You move your chair closer to the table, you move out of the way of a cyclist, the queue in front of you finally moves.
It works both ways round: you move (the train is moving) and you move something (move the box off the sofa). Move house and you change where you live — in American English the house drops off and people just move to Denver. A film that makes you cry has moved you, and the adjective from that is moving. As a noun, a move is one action in a plan or a game: your move, a smart career move, a house move. Watch the phrases — get a move on means hurry, and make a move can mean either start acting or, at a party, go home.
1verbmoveTo change position, or go from one place to another.~31%
“Nobody moved while the photographer counted to three.”
2verbshiftTo take something from one place and put it somewhere else.~5%
“Could you move your bike? It's blocking the door.”
3verbliveTo go and live in a different house or a different place.~21%
“They moved to a smaller flat after the children left.”
4verbtouchTo make someone feel something strongly, especially pity or sadness.~2%
“The last scene moved half the audience to tears.”
5nounstepAn action taken to get somewhere, or a turn in a game.~41%
“Selling the car was a sensible move.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Move came into English from Old French — moveir, mouver — and before that Latin moveō, which covered moving, changing, exchanging and quitting a place. Behind the Latin sits a Proto-Indo-European root, *m(y)ewh₁-, meaning to move or drive. English already had a word for this: stir, from Old English styrian. Move pushed it aside and left stir to soup and to trouble.
fro-nor
movoir
Middle English
moven
English, today
move
Built from
From Middle English moven, from fro-nor movoir. From Middle English moven, moeven, meven, borrowed from fro-nor mover, moveir and Old French mouver, moveir (“to move”) (compare modern French mouvoir from Old French movoir), from Latin moveō (“move; change, exchange, go in or out, quit”), from Proto-Indo-European m(y)ewh₁- (“to move, drive”). Cognate with Lithuanian mauti (“to push on, rush”), Sanskrit मीवति (“pushes, presses, moves”), Middle Dutch mouwe (“sleeve”). Largely displaced native English stir, from Middle English stiren, sturien, from Old English styrian. See also Old English hrēran.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA