Other forms: older, oldest
Old means something has been around a long time. A coat you have worn since school, a house with floors that slope, a dog with a grey muzzle and slow back legs.
Old does the plain work of stating age too: she is six years old, how old are you, a three-year-old car. Watch the two uses that have nothing to do with age. My old school and my old boss mean the ones before, not ancient ones, and an old friend is somebody you have known a long time, who might be twenty. The comparatives are older and oldest, and inside a family you also hear elder and eldest. For people, English prefers older people to old people, and the opposite splits: young for living things, new for objects.
1adjectiveoldHaving lived or existed for a long time.~41%
“They live in an old stone farmhouse by the river.”
2adjectivestatedOf a stated age.~24%
“My sister is nine years old today.”
3adjectiveformerFormer; the one before the current one.~33%
“I ran into my old maths teacher at the station.”
4adjectiveknownKnown or owned for a long time.~2%
“He is an old friend from university.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old goes back through Middle English to Old English eald, and before that to Proto-Germanic aldaz, which meant grown-up — it began as a participle, the finished form of a verb. Further back still sits the Proto-Indo-European root h2el-, grown, tall, big. The first idea in old was not worn out but fully grown.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂el- (grow)
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂el- — grown, tall, big
Proto-Germanic
*aldaz — grown-up
Proto-West Germanic
*ald
Old English
ald
Middle English
old
English, today
old
Built from
Middle English old, oold, from Old English ald, eald (“old, aged, ancient, antique, primeval”), from Proto-West Germanic ald, from Proto-Germanic aldaz (“grown-up”), originally a participle form, from Proto-Indo-European h₂el- (“grown, tall, big”). 2 Cognate with Scots aald, auld (“old”), yol yola, yolaw, yold, yole (“old”), frr ool, ual, uuil, uul, üülj (“old”), stq oold (“old”), West Frisian âld (“old”), gsw altu, oalt, oalts, olt, àltà (“old”), bar oid (“old”), gmw-cfr alt, aod, auw, oot (“old”), cim and German alt (“old”), Dutch oud (“old”), German Low German old, oolt (“old”), lb al (“old”), mhn òlt (“old”), wym aołd (“old”), Yiddish אַלט (“old”), Danish ældre (“elderly”), Faroese eldri (“elder, older”), Icelandic aldinn (“old”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk eldre (“elderly”), Swedish äldre (“elderly”), gme-cgo alt (“old”), Gothic 𐌰𐌻𐌸𐌴𐌹𐍃 (“old”), Latin altus (“high, tall, grown big, lofty”). Related to eld.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA