Other forms: spinning, spun, spins
To spin is to turn round and round fast, in one place. A coin spinning on a table, the drum of the washing machine at the end of the cycle, a child spinning on the lawn until the sky tilts.
Spin is a noun as well: the ball has spin on it, the car went into a spin, take the new bike for a spin. In news and politics spin is the version of the facts that flatters one side, and the people paid to produce it are spin doctors — a use with a sour edge to it, so nobody calls their own work spin. The oldest sense is still working: spiders spin webs, and wool was spun into thread on a wheel. The past tense is spun, never spinned.
1verbspinTo turn round and round quickly on one spot.~25%
“The coin spins on the table for a long time before it drops.”
2verbturnTo make something turn round quickly.~51%
“She spins the globe with one finger and stops it at random.”
3nounlogicFacts presented so that they favour one side.~19%
“The press office put its own spin on the figures.”
synonyms: slant
4verbdrawTo draw fibres out and twist them into thread; of a spider, to make a web.~5%
“The spider spins a new web across the doorway every night.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 154 sentences found in the wild and placed 59 of them on a sense (95 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English spinnan, before that Proto-Germanic *spinnaną, and behind that an ancient root, *(s)penh₁-. The word came into English with the language and has hardly shifted since: German spinnen, Swedish spinna, Danish spinde and Gothic all still say it. Wheels, dancers, spiders and press offices are all borrowing one very old turning.
Middle English
spinnen
English, today
spin
From Middle English spinnen. From Middle English spinnen, from Old English spinnan, from Proto-Germanic spinnaną, from Proto-Indo-European (s)penh₁-. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA