sit

UK/sɪt/US/sɪt/

verbA15 meanings One of the most common words in English · #149 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: sitting, sat, sits, sited

Sit is what you do when you stop standing and put your weight on a chair. Sit down, sit still, sit on the floor, sit next to me.

You sit down into a chair and then you are sitting in it — down belongs to the movement, not to the state. Things sit as well: the house sits at the top of the hill, the letter sits on the table for a week, food sits heavily after a big meal. A court or a committee sits when it is meeting officially, and Parliament is sitting today. In British English you sit an exam where an American takes one, and you can sit a friend's cat or sit their children while they are away. Sit tight means stay put and wait; sitting on a decision means putting it off.

Definitions of sit

1verbsitTo rest your body on a chair or other surface, with your weight off your legs.A1~46%
“Come and sit next to me by the window.”
2verbparticularTo be in a particular place or position.B1~6%
“The old mill sits on the far bank of the river.”
3verbmeetTo meet officially, of a court or committee.C1~26%
“The committee sits every second Tuesday.”
4verbtakeTo take an examination.B1~20%
“She sits her final exams in June.”
5verblookTo look after a child, pet or house while the owner is away.B2~2%
“I am sitting for the neighbours' cat this weekend.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 28 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense (13 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Phrases it lives in

sit tight — stay where you are and wait
sit on the fence — refuse to take either side

Where it comes from

Sit is old and almost unchanged: Middle English sitten, Old English sittan, Proto-Germanic *sitjaną, from a Proto-Indo-European root *sed- that already meant sit. Its relatives are everywhere — German sitzen, Dutch zitten, Swedish sitta, Latin sedeo, Russian сидеть. Few English words have travelled so far and arrived looking so much like themselves.

Proto-Indo-European
*sed-
Middle English
sitten
English, today
sit

From Middle English sitten. From Middle English sitten, from Old English sittan, from Proto-West Germanic sittjan, from Proto-Germanic sitjaną, from Proto-Indo-European sed- (“sit”). 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Everyday Verbs, Pets & Pet Care

Practise this word

sit in the wild

Over the course of the Nashville sit-in campaign, sit-ins were staged at numerous stores in the central business district.
Nashville sit-ins
The students from this organization initiated the Nashville sit-ins in 1960.
Nashville Student Movement
The sit-in sparked debates within the African American communities in Durham about the strategies of civil rights activism.
Royal Ice Cream sit-in
Even though the Greensboro sit-in was not the first sit-in, it sparked a wave of sit-ins that created the sit-in movement.
Sit-in movement
The sit-in movement took place during the 1960s, but sit-ins were occurring all over America many years before then.
Sit-in movement

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

Definitions of sit

1verbsitTo rest your body on a chair or other surface, with your weight off your legs.A1~46%

“Come and sit next to me by the window.”

2verbparticularTo be in a particular place or position.B1~6%

“The old mill sits on the far bank of the river.”

3verbmeetTo meet officially, of a court or committee.C1~26%

“The committee sits every second Tuesday.”

4verbtakeTo take an examination.B1~20%

“She sits her final exams in June.”

5verblookTo look after a child, pet or house while the owner is away.B2~2%

“I am sitting for the neighbours' cat this weekend.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 28 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense (13 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.