Other forms: nursing, nurses, nursed
A nurse is the person on the ward who checks on you, changes the dressing, brings the drugs round and notices at three in the morning that something is wrong. The school nurse, the district nurse, the nurse at the vaccination clinic.
Nursing is a profession with its own degrees and ranks — a registered nurse, a nurse practitioner who can prescribe, a charge nurse running a ward — so a nurse is nobody's assistant. The verb runs wide: you nurse a patient back to health, nurse a cold in bed, nurse a drink all evening to make it last, and nurse a grudge for years, keeping it warm on purpose. To nurse a baby is to feed it at the breast, and a wet nurse was a woman paid to feed another family's child. Men who do the job are nurses; male nurse is not a job title. The nursery, whether it holds children or young plants, is named from the same idea of feeding and tending.
1nounnurseA trained person who cares for sick or injured people.~89%
“The nurse checked his blood pressure before the doctor came in.”
2verbillTo care for someone who is ill.~2%
“She nursed her father through the last months of his illness.”
3verbholdTo hold something and make it last, or to look after it carefully.~2%
“He nursed the same pint for two hours.”
4verbkeepTo keep a feeling alive over a long time.~2%
“He nursed a grudge against his brother for thirty years.”
5verbfeedTo feed a baby at the breast.~5%
“She sat by the window nursing the baby.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
nurse is a medical worker.
Nurse reached English through Old French norrice from Latin nūtrīcia, which sits beside nūtrīx, a wet nurse, and nūtriō, to suckle. The first job of a nurse was feeding, not medicine — the hospital sense grew out of the woman who fed and tended a child. Nourish, nutrition and nutrient all come down from that same Latin verb.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)neh₂-
Latin
nūtrīcia
Old French
norrice
Middle English
norice
English, today
nurse
Built from
From Middle English norice, from Old French norrice, from Latin nūtrīcia, noun based on Latin nūtrīcius (“that which nourishes”), from nūtrīx (“wet nurse”), from nūtriō (“to suckle”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA