Other forms: parks, parking, parked
A park is the green space in a town where people walk dogs and children run about. Benches, a path round the edge, a bin by the gate, someone asleep on the grass in June.
Park is also the verb for leaving a car standing: you park outside the house, you circle the block looking for somewhere to park, and the place itself is a car park in Britain and a parking lot in America. The noun stretches to any enclosed area with a purpose — a national park, a theme park, a business park with no grass in it at all. In an automatic car, P stands for park. Informally you park an idea when you set it aside for later, and you can park yourself in a chair and not move for an hour.
1nounparkA public green space in a town.~59%
“We took the children to the park after lunch.”
2verbcarTo stop a vehicle and leave it standing somewhere.~2%
“He parked in front of the bakery.”
3nounlargeA large area of protected countryside.~15%
“The road runs straight through the national park.”
4nounlandAn area of land laid out for one purpose.~22%
“The company moved to a business park outside town.”
5verbquestionTo leave a question or a plan aside for now.~2%
“Let us park that until the budget is agreed.”
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.
Park began as a pen for animals. Old French parc meant a livestock enclosure, and behind it sits Frankish parruk, 'enclosure, pen, fence' — the same word that gave English paddock. The fence came first; the benches, the bandstand and the ducks arrived centuries later.
Frankish
*parruk — enclosure, pen, fence
Medieval Latin
parcus
Old French
parc — livestock pen
Middle English
park
English, today
park
From Middle English park, from Old French parc (“livestock pen”), from Medieval Latin parcus, parricus, from Frankish parruk (“enclosure, pen, fence”). Cognate with Dutch perk (“enclosure; flowerbed”), Old High German pfarrih, pferrih (“enclosure, pen”), Old English pearroc (“enclosure”) (whence modern English paddock), Old Norse parrak, parak (“enclosure, pen; distress, anxiety”), Icelandic parraka (“to keep pent in under restraint and coercion”). More at parrock, paddock.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA