Other forms: sold, selling, sells
To sell something is to hand it over in exchange for money. A shop sells bread, a family sells a house, a musician sells tickets. It is irregular: sell, sold, sold.
The pair to learn it with is buy, and the direction of the preposition is where errors happen: you sell something to somebody and buy something from somebody. Two extensions matter. A thing can sell by itself — the book sold ten thousand copies, tickets are selling fast — with no seller mentioned. And to sell somebody on an idea is to persuade them, which is why a proposal can be a hard sell and why sell out has two quite different meanings: to run out of stock, and to abandon your principles for money.
1verbsellTo give something to somebody in exchange for money.~93%
“They sell coffee and almost nothing else.”
synonyms: vend, trade
2verbgoodsOf goods, to be bought.~5%
“The blue ones sell better than the red.”
3verbpersuadeTo persuade somebody to accept an idea.~2%
“He still has to sell the plan to the board.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
sell is a way of exchanging.
Old English sellan meant simply to give or hand over — no money required. The narrowing to giving for payment happened gradually, and the older sense survives fossilised in the word handsel, an old name for a gift given to start something off.
Proto-Indo-European
*selh₁-
Proto-Germanic
*saljaną
Proto-West Germanic
*salljan
Old English
sellan — give; give up for money
Middle English
sellen
English, today
sell
From Middle English sellen, from Old English sellan (“give; give up for money”), from Proto-West Germanic salljan, from Proto-Germanic saljaną, from Proto-Indo-European selh₁-. 2 Cognate with Scots sell (“to sell”), Danish sælge (“to sell”), Norwegian Bokmål selge (“to sell”), Norwegian Nynorsk selja, selje (“to sell”), Swedish sälja (“to sell”), Faroese and Icelandic selja (“to sell”), Gothic 𐍃𐌰𐌻𐌾𐌰𐌽 (“to pay tribute, make an offer”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA