Other forms: standing, stands, stood
To stand is to be up on your feet, upright, not sitting and not lying down. Standing on a crowded bus, standing in the queue at the post office, standing at the back because the chairs ran out.
The word reaches a long way from feet. A building stands somewhere — the church stands at the top of the hill — and so does anything upright and still. Can't stand is one of the commonest uses in speech and has nothing to do with legs: I can't stand the noise means I hate it. An offer or a decision that still stands is still valid. As a noun, a stand is a small stall selling things at a market, a frame that holds something up like a music stand or an umbrella stand, or the seats at a football ground, where it is always the stands. And when you take a stand, you say publicly what you believe and refuse to move off it.
1verbstandTo be on your feet, upright, not sitting or lying down.~29%
“We had to stand the whole way to Leeds.”
2verbfeetTo get up onto your feet.~2%
“Everyone stands when the judge comes in.”
3verbplaceTo be in a place, upright and still.~15%
“A single oak stands in the middle of the field.”
4verbbearTo bear something you dislike.~2%
“I can't stand the way he chews.”
5verbtrueTo still be true, valid or in force.~15%
“The offer stands until Friday.”
6nounsmallA small stall where things are sold or shown.~2%
“They bought strawberries from a stand by the road.”
7nounframeA frame or base that holds something up.~14%
“The music stand kept sliding down mid-song.”
8nounrowsThe rows of seats at a sports ground.~7%
“The stand behind the goal was full an hour early.”
9nounpublicA public position you take and defend.~14%
“She took a stand against the closure and lost her job for it.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 21 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense (8 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Stand goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root, and English belongs to the branch that pushed an extra n into it: Proto-Germanic standaną, Old English standan, to stand or occupy a place. That n is why we say stand but stood — the present keeps the insert, the past drops it. Every Germanic cousin carries the same word, from Gothic to Danish stande.
Proto-Indo-European
*steh₂-
Middle English
stonden
English, today
stand
From Middle English stonden. From Middle English stonden, standen and stand, stond, from Old English standan (“to stand, occupy a place”), from Proto-West Germanic standan, from Proto-Germanic standaną (“to stand”), from Pre-Germanic sth₂-n-t-´, an innovative extended n-infixed form of Proto-Indo-European steh₂-. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA