Other forms: preaching, preached, preaches
To preach is to give a religious talk to people who came to listen. A priest in the pulpit on Sunday morning, a man with a microphone outside the station telling the street about the end of the world.
The verb walked out of church and straight into everyday annoyance: when someone lectures you about your diet or your bedtime, they are preaching, and 'don't preach at me' is the reply. You preach a sermon, preach the gospel, preach patience — that last one meaning you recommend it loudly and more than once. The person is a preacher, the talk is preaching, and preachy is the adjective for a film or a friend who overdoes it. Two fixed phrases carry the word: practise what you preach, and preach to the converted.
1verbreligiousTo give a religious talk to a congregation.~96%
“He preached for twenty minutes on forgiveness.”
2verbpreachTo give people moral advice they did not ask for.~2%
“Stop preaching and let me make my own mistakes.”
synonyms: moralise, lecture
3verbrecommendTo recommend something publicly and repeatedly.~2%
“She preaches patience but has none herself.”
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.
Preach came through Old French prëechier from Latin praedicō, 'to proclaim, to announce', built to mean something like declaring in advance — the same Latin verb that gave English predicate. Half of Europe took it for the same act: German predigen, Dutch preken, Swedish predika. English got a churchy word out of a plain word for announcing.
Proto-Indo-European
*deyḱ-
Latin
praedicō — to proclaim, announce
Old French
prëechier
Middle English
prechen
English, today
preach
From Middle English prechen, from Old French prëechier, precchier (Modern French prêcher), from Latin praedicō (“to proclaim, announce”) literally “to fore-assign, pre-dedicate”. a doublet of predicate. The Latin word is also the source of Old English predician (“to preach”), stq preetje (“to preach”), West Frisian preekje (“to preach”), Dutch preken (“to preach”), German Low German preken (“to preach”), German predigen (“to preach”), Danish prædike (“to preach”), Swedish predika (“to preach”), Icelandic prédika (“to preach”), Norwegian Nynorsk preika (“to preach”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA