Other forms: sets, setting
A set is the built world a scene is filmed on: a kitchen with only three walls, a street that is a row of fronts propped up from behind. Actors are on set at six in the morning, standing in a house with no roof on it.
Away from film, a set is a group of things that belong together — a set of keys, a chess set, a set of six glasses. Tennis is played in sets, and a band plays a set. Then there is the verb, which does more work than almost any other word in English: you set a table, set an alarm, set a date, set someone free. The sun sets. Jelly and concrete set, meaning they go hard. Nothing changes shape along the way, since set is the past tense and the past participle as well.
1verbputTo put something somewhere carefully, or arrange it ready for use.~26%
“She set the tray down on the end of the bed.”
2noungroupA group of things that belong together.~33%
“She keeps a spare set of keys under the plant pot.”
3verbbecomeTo become firm or solid.~2%
“Leave the jelly in the fridge until it sets.”
4verbsunOf the sun, to go down below the horizon.~2%
“We watched the sun set behind the hills.”
5nounsectionA section of a tennis match, made up of games.~33%
“He lost the first set and won the next three.”
6nounsongsThe songs a band or a DJ plays in one performance.~2%
“They finished the set with an old single.”
7nounsetThe constructed scenery where a film or television scene is shot.~2%
“The whole set was built inside an aircraft hangar.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Set is what you do to make something sit. Old English settan came from Proto-Germanic satjaną and, before that, from a causative form of the Proto-Indo-European root sed-, to sit. Setting a cup on a table is still exactly that: making the cup sit.
Middle English
setten
English, today
set
Built from
From Middle English setten. From Middle English setten, from Old English settan, from Proto-West Germanic sattjan, from Proto-Germanic satjaną, from Proto-Indo-European sodéyeti, causative of sed- (“to sit”). Cognate with Dutch zetten, German setzen, Danish sætte, Norwegian Bokmål sette, Icelandic and Norwegian Nynorsk setja, Swedish sätta, Faroese seta.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA