Other forms: pools, pooled, pooling
A pool is a body of still water, and in particular the one people swim lengths in. A swimming pool, the deep end of the pool, an outdoor pool.
A standard competition pool is fifty metres long, and a short-course one twenty-five. A pool is also any small still body of water — a rock pool, a pool of light, a pool of blood. Quite separately, to pool resources is to combine them, and a car pool and a typing pool come from that; and pool is the cue sport played on a small table.
1nounpoolA body of still water, especially one for swimming.
“The pool is about fifty metres and nine lanes.”
2verbcombineTo combine resources with others.
“The friends pooled their money to buy their teacher a present.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
pool is still water, or a combining.
Also accepted in games: swimming pool
Old English pol is Germanic. The combining sense is a different word entirely, from French poule, a hen — the stake in a card game — which is also where the cue sport's name comes from.
Proto-Indo-European
*bōlos — bog, marsh
Proto-Germanic
*pōlaz — pool, pond
Proto-West Germanic
pōl
Old English
pōl — pool
Middle English
pool
English, today
pool
From Middle English pool, pole, pol, from Old English pōl (“pool”), from Proto-West Germanic pōl, from Proto-Germanic pōlaz (“pool, pond”), from Proto-Indo-European bōlos (“bog, marsh”). Cognate with Scots puil (“pool”), stq Pol (“pool”), West Frisian poel (“pool”), Dutch poel (“pool”), German Low German Pohl, Pool, Pul (“pool”), German Pfuhl (“quagmire, mudhole”), Danish pøl (“puddle”), Swedish pöl (“puddle, pool”), Icelandic pollur (“puddle”), Lithuanian bala (“puddle”), Latvian bala (“a muddly, treeless depression”), Russian боло́то (“swamp, bog, marsh”). For the meaning development to a supply of resources compare typologically пруд пруди́ (< пруд).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA