Other forms: owned, owns, owning
To own something is for it to be legally yours — you paid for it, you can sell it, nobody can take it off you. You own a bike, a flat, a dog, the mug you drink from every morning.
Own is a state rather than an action, so it sits badly in the -ing form: you own a car, you are not owning it. The other own is the small word after a possessive that makes it emphatic — my own room, her own money, do it in your own time — and on your own means alone or without help. The person is the owner and the fact is ownership. Own up means admit you did it. A cluster of everyday phrases builds on the same word: hold your own means cope against someone stronger, get your own back means take revenge, and come into your own means finally show what you are worth.
1verbownTo have something as your legal property.~23%
“They own a small farm outside the village.”
synonyms: possess, have
2adjectivebelongingBelonging to the person just mentioned and to nobody else.~75%
“She has always wanted a room of her own.”
3verbadmitTo admit something openly, especially something you would rather hide.~2%
“She owned her mistake in front of the whole team.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: possess
Own started life as a past participle. Old English āgen meant own, proper, one's very own, and it was the past participle of āgan, to have — so what you owned was, grammatically, what had been had. Behind it stand Proto-Germanic aiganaz and a Proto-Indo-European root h₂eyḱ-, to have or possess. German eigen and Swedish egen are the same word, still doing the same job.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂eyḱ- — to have, possess
Proto-Germanic
*aiganaz — own
Proto-West Germanic
*aigan — own
Old English
āgen — own, proper, peculiar
Middle English
oun
English, today
own
From Middle English oun, owen, from Old English āgen (“own, proper, peculiar”), originally the past participle of āgan; from Proto-West Germanic aigan (“own”), from Proto-Germanic aiganaz (“own”), from Proto-Indo-European h₂eyḱ- (“to have, possess”). a doublet of eigen-. 2 Cognate with Scots ain, awin, awn, ayn (“own”), stq oain (“own”), West Frisian, Dutch and German eigen (“own”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål and Swedish egen (“own”), Faroese egin (“own”), Icelandic eigin, eiginn (“own”), Norwegian Nynorsk eigen (“own”); also os исын (“to take”), xto and txb aik- (“to know, recognize”), Sanskrit ईश (“owning, possessing”). Originally past participle of the verb at hand in owe.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA