Other forms: nails, nailed, nailing
Your nail is the hard flat plate at the end of a finger or a toe. Bitten down to nothing, painted red, or tapping on a table while somebody waits for an answer.
The other nail is the thin metal spike you hammer into wood, and English has used one word for both for as long as it has been written down. As a verb you nail a board across a window, and in everyday speech you nail something when you do it exactly right: she nailed the audition. Police nail a suspect when they catch them with proof. Keep the workshop words apart: a nail is hammered, a screw is turned, and a tack is a very short nail. Nail varnish in Britain is nail polish in America, and both go on the finger, not the fence.
1nounnailThe hard flat covering at the end of a finger or toe.~55%
“She bit her nails all the way through the interview.”
2nounthinA thin metal spike hammered into wood to hold things together.~39%
“He drove the last nail into the fence post.”
3verbfastenTo fasten something in place with nails.~2%
“They nailed a sheet of plywood over the broken window.”
4verbexactlyTo do something exactly right (informal).~2%
“She nailed the landing and the whole hall stood up.”
5verbcatchTo catch someone doing wrong, with the proof to show it (informal).~2%
“The tax office nailed him for three years of unpaid bills.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
nail is a part of the body.
Nail is among the oldest words English owns: Old English naegl, from a Proto-Indo-European root that already meant nail. The same root produced Latin unguis, Greek onyx and Russian nogot, all for the thing on the end of a finger. English never bothered inventing a second word when it started hammering metal ones into wood.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₃negʰ-
Proto-Indo-European
*h₃nogʰ- — nail
Proto-Germanic
*naglaz
Proto-West Germanic
*nagl
Old English
næġl
Middle English
nail
English, today
nail
From Middle English nail, nayl, Old English næġl, from Proto-West Germanic nagl, from Proto-Germanic naglaz, from Proto-Indo-European h₃nogʰ- (“nail”). 2 Compare frr Nail (“nail”), stq Nail (“nail”), West Frisian neil, German and Low German Nagel, Dutch and Swedish nagel, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål negl, Norwegian Nynorsk nagl, Finnish naula (“nail”), Estonian nael (“nail”), (compare Irish ionga, Latin unguis, Albanian nyell (“ankle, hard part of a limb”), Lithuanian nagas, Russian нога́ (“foot, leg”), но́готь (“nail”), Ancient Greek ὄνυξ, Persian ناخن, Sanskrit नख.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA