Other forms: points, pointed, pointing
To point is to put one finger out and show where something is. The child pointing at the aeroplane, the guide pointing down the corridor, you pointing at a dish on the menu because you cannot say its name.
As a noun, point is one of the hardest-working words in English. It is the sharp end of a pencil or a knife; the dot in a decimal; a place or a moment, as in at that point I left; a unit of score, as in we lost by three points; and the thing somebody is trying to say, which is where what's your point, a fair point and you've missed the point all come from. There is no point in doing something means it is not worth doing. Watch the prepositions: you point at a thing to show it, you point to a fact as evidence, and you point out a mistake. In Britain, pointing at a person is rude.
1verbverbTo show where something is by holding out a finger.~2%
“She pointed at the map and said we were here.”
2nountryingThe thing somebody is trying to say; the reason for doing something.~13%
“I take your point, but we still have to pay.”
3noununitA unit of score in a game, a test or a competition.~83%
“The home team won by four points.”
4nountipThe sharp end of something.~2%
“The point of the pencil snapped on the first line.”
synonyms: tip
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 139 sentences found in the wild and placed 36 of them on a sense (103 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin pungō meant to prick, and a pūnctum was the little hole left behind — a dot. Everything the word does now comes out of that dot: the sharp tip that makes it, the mark on the page, the score on a card, the moment on a line. English took the same Latin word half a dozen times over — punt, punto, punctum — and point is the one that spread.
Middle English
poynt
English, today
point
Built from
From Middle English poynt. From Middle English poynt, from Old French point (“dot; minute amount”), from Latin pūnctum (“a hole punched in; a point, puncture”), substantive use of pūnctus, perfect passive participle of pungō (“to prick, punch”); alternatively, from Old French pointe (“sharp tip”), from Latin pūnctus, all from Proto-Italic pungō (“to sting, prick”). Mostly displaced native Middle English ord (“point”), from Old English ord (“point”). a doublet of pointe and ponto and puncto and punctum and punt and punto.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA