Other forms: stuck, sticks, sticking
A stick is a thin piece of wood broken from a tree. Pick up a stick, throw the stick, a walking stick.
It is the plainest of objects and one of the oldest tools there is. It also names anything of that shape — a stick of celery, a stick of rock, a glue stick. As a verb, stick means both to push in and to adhere, which is one word doing two jobs. Note stick at it; the carrot and the stick; and get the wrong end of the stick.
1nounstickA thin piece of wood broken from a tree.~98%
“The children collected dry sticks from the woods to start the campfire.”
2verbpushTo push in, or to adhere.~2%
“Stick a candle in the middle of the cake.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
stick is a piece of wood.
Old English sticca meant a stick or peg, from a root meaning to pierce. Stitch, sting and stick as a verb come from the same piercing.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)teyg-
Middle English
stikke
English, today
stick
Built from
From Middle English stikke. From Middle English sticke, stik, stikke (“branch, twig; kindling; mast; pale; stick, stylus”), from Old English sticca (“stick; peg; beam, rod”), from Proto-West Germanic stikkō, from Proto-Germanic stikkô (“pole, stick”), from stikkōną (“to fix, stick”), from stikaną (“to stick; to stab”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)teyg- (“to be sharp; to sting”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA