Other forms: raised, raising, raises
To raise something is to lift it — to move it upwards. You raise your hand in class, raise a glass to the bride, raise the blind and let the morning in.
From there it spreads a long way out. You raise money for a charity, raise the rent, raise your voice, raise chickens, raise a question nobody wants to answer, and you raise children until they are grown. One rule holds all of it together: raise always takes an object — something raises something else. That is the whole difference from rise, which never takes one. Prices rise, but the landlord raises them; the sun rises, but you raise the flag. As a noun, a raise is an increase in pay in American English, and British English calls the same thing a rise.
1verbliftTo lift something to a higher position.~10%
“Raise your hand if you have a question.”
synonyms: lift
2verbputTo make an amount, a level or a standard higher.~72%
“They raised the price twice in one year.”
synonyms: increase, put up
3verbraiseTo look after a child until it is grown, or to keep and breed animals.~16%
“She raised four children on her own.”
synonyms: bring up
4nounpayAn increase in the money you are paid — the American word for a pay rise.~2%
“He asked his boss for a raise and got one.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 138 sentences found in the wild and placed 49 of them on a sense (89 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: bring up
Raise is the Norse verb reisa, and it was built as the causative of rise: to raise a thing is to make it rise. The pair have kept that shape for a thousand years, which is exactly why one of them needs an object and the other never takes one. Rear is the same word again, arriving by a different road.
Proto-Germanic
*raisijaną
Old Norse
reisa — to raise
Middle English
reysen
English, today
raise
Built from
From Middle English reysen, raisen, reisen, from Old Norse reisa (“to raise”), from Proto-Germanic raisijaną, raizijaną (“to raise”), causative form of Proto-Germanic rīsaną (“to rise”), from Proto-Indo-European h₁rey- (“to rise, arise”). According to Kroonen (2013), from Proto-Indo-European h₃er- (“to stir, rise”). Cognate with Old English rāsian (“to explore, examine, research”), Old English rīsan (“to seize, carry off”), Old English rǣran (“to raise”). a doublet of rear.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA