Other forms: premises
A premise is what an argument takes for granted before it starts — the part nobody is arguing about, holding up everything that follows. Someone says the office is too small, so the company should move. The premise is that the office is too small; the move is what they want you to agree to.
You accept a premise, you question one, you reject one — and rejecting the premise is how you win an argument without ever touching the conclusion. A story has a premise too: the one-line setup you agree to so the thing can happen, like a man waking up on the same morning over and over. Then the strange relative. In property and legal English, premises means the building and the ground it sits on — no smoking on the premises, the premises were searched — and it is plural in shape while meaning one place: these premises, never a premise you can walk into.
1nounpremiseA statement an argument starts from and treats as true.~70%
“The whole plan rests on a premise nobody has checked.”
formal in this meaning — an editor’s judgement
synonyms: assumption, proposition
2nounbasicThe basic idea a story or a film is built on.~25%
“The premise is simple: two strangers swap houses for a month.”
3nounpluralIn the plural, premises: a building and the land it stands on.~5%
“Alcohol may not be taken off the premises.”
formal in this meaning — an editor’s judgement
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
premise is a statement.
PREM-ise → a PROMise
A tower of bricks stands in the middle of the road, and on the bottom brick a promise is written in chalk. A man walks up with a wet cloth and rubs the promise off. The whole tower comes down over his boots.
hooks ontopromise
Latin praemittō meant to send on ahead: prae, before, plus mittō, to send. In logic the premissa propositio was the proposition set before the rest — the sentence sent on ahead so that a conclusion could follow it. The building sense is an accident. Title deeds used premises for the things named earlier in the document, property owners read it as the property itself, and the mistake stuck.
Proto-Indo-European
*mey- (change)
Latin
praemitto — to send or put before
Medieval Latin
premissa — set before
Old French
premisse
Middle English
premise
English, today
premise
Built from
From Middle English premise, from Old French premisse, from Medieval Latin premissa (“set before”) (premissa propositio (“the proposition set before”)), feminine past participle of Latin praemitto (“to send or put before”), from prae- (“before”) + mitto (“to send”). Sense 4, a piece of real estate arose from the misinterpretation of the word by property owners while reading title deeds where the word was used with the legal sense.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA