Other forms: presses, pressed, pressing
To press is to push and keep pushing — steady weight rather than a tap. You press the button for the fourth floor, press a shirt flat under a hot iron, press your hand against a cold window to feel the winter on the other side.
The press is something else again: the newspapers, the magazines and the reporters who fill them, spoken of as one body. The press were waiting at the gate. A press is also a machine that squeezes — a printing press, a wine press, the trouser press in a hotel room. Press someone and you keep asking until they answer, and you press for a change in the law. It gives us a shelf of fixed phrases too: pressed for time, press on, press charges, hot off the press.
1verbpushTo push firmly and steadily on something.
“Press the green button and hold it for three seconds.”
2nounpressNewspapers, magazines and the journalists who work for them, taken together.
“The press printed the story on every front page.”
3verbflattenTo flatten or smooth something under weight — clothes with an iron, flowers in a book.
“He pressed his shirt on the kitchen table.”
4verbkeepTo keep asking someone for something until you get it.
“Reporters pressed her for a straight answer.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: the media
In Middle English a presse was a crowd — bodies squeezed together in a market — and also a clothespress, the cupboard that held cloth flat. The crowd came in through Old French presse; the clothespress was already in Old English, straight from Medieval Latin pressa, and both go back to Latin premere, to press. Every press since is that same squeeze: the machine, the newspapers, your thumb on a button.
Proto-Indo-European
*per-
Old French
presse
Medieval Latin
pressa
Old English
press — clothespress
Middle English
presse — throng, crowd, clothespress
English, today
press
Built from
From Middle English presse (“throng, crowd, clothespress”), partially from Old English press (“clothespress”) (from Medieval Latin pressa) and from Old French presse (Modern French presse) from Old French presser (“to press”), from Latin pressāre, from pressus, past participle of premere (“to press”). Chiefly displaced native Middle English thring (“press, crowd, throng”) (from Old English þring (“a press, crowd, anything that presses or confines”)). see English thring
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA