Other forms: silvers
Silver is the shiny grey-white metal that rings, spoons and old coins are made of. It is also the colour: a silver car in the rain, silver hair, the silver foil round a bar of chocolate.
The word carries three jobs at once — the metal, the colour, and the objects. In a British house, the silver means the knives, forks and dishes kept in a box for Christmas. At a sports event, silver is second place: she took silver, a silver medal. Chemists write it Ag, from its Latin name. As a colour word, silver is not white and not plain grey; the shine is the point, which is why a silver dress and a grey dress are not the same dress. English keeps a small store of fixed phrases here: a silver lining, the silver screen, a silver spoon.
1nounsoftA soft shiny grey-white metal, used for jewellery, coins and cutlery.~67%
“The ring is silver, not white gold.”
2nounpaleThe pale shining grey colour of that metal.~2%
“The sea went the colour of silver just before the storm.”
3adjectivesilverHaving that pale shining grey colour.~10%
“He drove a silver van with the company name on the side.”
4nounknivesKnives, forks, dishes and other objects made of silver.~2%
“She got the good silver out for her parents-in-law.”
5nounmedalThe medal given for coming second.~19%
“The pair took silver in the relay.”
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.
silver is a metal.
Silver comes down from Old English seolfor and Proto-Germanic silubrą, and there the trail stops. Nobody knows where the word began. The same odd shape turns up in Dutch zilver, German Silber and Swedish silver, but also in Lithuanian sidabras, in Celtiberian, and in Basque zilar, a language related to none of them — which suggests the word travelled with the metal, from a source now lost.
Middle English
silver
English, today
silver
From Middle English silver. Middle English silver,selver,sulver, from Old English seolfor, from Proto-West Germanic silubr, from Proto-Germanic silubrą (“silver”), of unknown origin. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA