Other forms: nerves
A nerve is one of the thin body wires that carry feeling to your brain. Trapped nerve, nerve endings, a nerve in the tooth.
Nerves carry signals in both directions — sensation in and instructions out — as electrical impulses travelling at up to about a hundred metres a second. A trapped nerve hurts where it ends rather than where it is pinched, which is why sciatica is felt in the leg. Note nerves, meaning anxiety; get on somebody's nerves; and have the nerve, meaning to have the boldness.
1nounnerveA fibre carrying signals between body and brain.
“Signals travel about a hundred metres a second along a nerve.”
2nounboldnessBoldness, or anxiety in the plural.
“It took some nerve to stand there for four minutes.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
nerve is a body fibre, or boldness.
Also accepted in games: nerves
Latin nervus meant a sinew or tendon, and the anatomical sense came later. Sinew and neuron are the same word by other routes, and nerve meant strength before it meant a fibre.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)neh₁-
German
nerven
Latin
nervus — sinew
Medieval Latin
nervus — nerve
Middle English
nerve
English, today
nerve
Recorded since circa 1374 as Middle English nerve, from Medieval Latin nervus (“nerve”), from Latin nervus (“sinew”). a doublet of neuron and sinew. get on someone's nerves is chiefly a German nerven.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA