Other forms: spreads, spread, spreading
To spread is to open a thing out flat or push it thin. You spread butter into the corners of the toast, spread a map across the bonnet of the car, spread a blanket on the grass and sit on it.
The past tense is the trap: spread, spread, spread — never spreaded, however natural that feels. Half the time the verb needs no object at all: fire spreads, news spreads, a rumour spreads through an office in one afternoon. As a noun it is what you put on bread — chocolate spread, cheese spread — and also a big meal laid out on a table, and the two facing pages of a magazine. Things spread out, the search party spread out across the moor, you spread the word when you tell everyone, and you spread yourself too thin when you take on more than you can carry.
1verbbutterTo push something soft thinly across a surface.~2%
“Spread the butter right into the corners.”
Patternspread sth on / over + surface · spread sth thinly / evenly · spread with a knife · a spread
synonyms: smear
2verbspreadTo reach or move over a wider and wider area.~93%
“The fire spread to the roof within minutes.”
3verbunfoldTo open something out flat.~2%
“He spread the map across the table.”
synonyms: unfold
4nounfoodA soft food you put on bread.~3%
“There was cheese spread and not much else in the fridge.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 130 of them on a sense (10 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
sPREAD → butter pushed across the bREAD
Push the soft butter across the bread with a knife until there is butter in every corner: you spread it, thin and even.
hooks ontobread
The root is *(s)per-, to strew, to sow, to sprinkle — a farmer's word, the arm going out over a field and the seed leaving the hand. Old English sprǣdan already meant to spread and expand, and every modern spread still has the seed in it: butter across toast, fire across a roof, a rumour across an office.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)per- — to strew, sow, sprinkle
Proto-Germanic
*spraidijaną — to spread
Old English
sprǣdan — to spread, expand
Middle English
spreden
English, today
spread
From Middle English spreden, from Old English sprǣdan (“to spread, expand”), from Proto-Germanic spraidijaną (“to spread”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)per- (“to strew, sow, sprinkle”). Cognate with stq spreede (“to spread”), West Frisian spriede (“to spread”), frr spriedjen (“to spread”), Dutch spreiden (“to spread”), Low German spreden (“to spread”), German spreiten (“to spread, spread out”), Danish sprede (“to spread”), Norwegian spre, spreie (“to spread, disseminate”), Swedish sprida (“to spread”), Latin spernō, spargō, Ancient Greek σπείρω, Persian سپردن (“to deposit”). a doublet of spurn.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA