Ready means there is nothing left to do before the thing can start. The bags are by the door, the oven has come up to temperature, the guests have their coats on. You are only waiting for the off.
It takes TO before a verb and FOR before a noun: ready to go, ready for school. Ready also means willing and quick, as in a ready smile, ready to help anyone who asks, always ready with an excuse, and there it describes a character rather than a state of preparation. It hooks onto other words as well: ready-made, a ready meal, ready money that is cash in your hand. The verb ready, as in to ready the boat, is formal and rare, so use prepare. One warning: in English 'I'm ready' means prepared to start, never 'I have finished', which is what the matching word means in several other languages.
1adjectivereadyFully prepared, with nothing left to do first.~88%
“Dinner is ready, so wash your hands.”
synonyms: prepared, set
2adjectivepromptWilling, and quick to do something.~10%
“He has a ready answer for every complaint.”
3adjectiveavailableClose at hand and available the moment it is wanted.~2%
“Keep a torch ready by the bed.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
In Old English rǣde and ġerǣde meant prepared and prompt, and one of the things they described was a horse fit to ride. Behind them stand Proto-Germanic *raidaz, 'ready', and a Proto-Indo-European root about counting, arranging and putting in order, probably tangled with another root meaning 'to ride'. So being ready is, at bottom, having everything arranged in its place; the -y ending arrived in Middle English as redy.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂er-
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂reh₁dʰ-
Proto-Germanic
*garaidijaz
Old English
rǣde
Middle English
redy
English, today
ready
Built from
From Middle English redy, redi, rædiȝ, iredi, ȝerædi, alteration (y) of earlier ired, irede, ȝerad (“ready, prepared”), from Old English rǣde, ġerǣde (also ġerȳde) "prepared, prompt, ready, ready for riding (horse), mounted (on a horse), skilled, simple, easy", from Proto-Germanic garaidijaz, raidijaz, from base raidaz (“ready”), from Proto-Indo-European h₂reh₁dʰ-, h₂reh₁- (“to count, put in order, arrange, make comfortable”) and also probably conflated with Proto-Indo-European reydʰ- (“to ride”) in the sense of "set to ride, able or fit to go, ready". Cognate with Scots readie, reddy (“ready, prepared”), West Frisian ree (“ready”), Dutch gereed (“ready”), German bereit (“ready”), Danish rede (“ready”), Swedish redo (“ready, fit, prepared”), Norwegian reiug (“ready, prepared”), Icelandic greiður (“easy, light”), Gothic 𐌲𐌰𐍂𐌰𐌹𐌸𐍃 (“arranged, ordered”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA