Other forms: songs
A song is one piece of music with words to sing. A love song, sing a song, the song was a hit.
Songwriter, songbook and song title are standard. Birdsong is the singing of birds and is one word. Note for a song, meaning very cheaply — bought it for a song; on song, meaning performing well; and a song and dance, meaning an unnecessary fuss. And note that song and sing are the same word with the vowel changed, which is how English made nouns from verbs before it borrowed endings.
1nounsongOne piece of music with words to sing.~88%
“This is my favourite song, so turn up the radio!”
2nounbirdsThe singing of birds.~12%
“The song starts at about four in the morning in May.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
song is a piece of music.
Old English sang comes straight from singan, to sing, with the vowel change that English used to make nouns — the same pattern as bind and band, drink and drank. It is one of the oldest word-building tricks in the language.
Proto-Indo-European
*sengʷʰ-
Middle English
song
English, today
song
From Middle English song. From Middle English song, sang, from Old English sang, from Proto-West Germanic sangu, from Proto-Germanic sangwaz (“singing, song”), from Proto-Indo-European sengʷʰ- (“to sing”). Cognate with Scots sang, song (“singing, song”), stq Song (“song”), West Frisian sang (“song”), Dutch zang (“song”), Low German sang (“song”), German Sang (“singing, song”), Swedish sång (“song”), Norwegian Bokmål sang (“song”), Norwegian Nynorsk song (“song”), Icelandic söngur (“song”), Ancient Greek ὀμφή (“voice, oracle”). More at sing.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA