Straight means going in one line without bending. A straight road, a straight line, straight hair — the shape is the core, and everything else the word does is that shape used as a picture.
From the shape come three useful extensions. Direct in manner: a straight answer is one that does not go round the question. Immediate: come straight home means without stopping anywhere. And honest or ordinary: playing it straight, a straight bat. Beware the spelling — straight is the line, strait is the narrow channel of water, and they sound identical. The phrase is straitlaced and a strait is where ships queue, so if it is about shape you want the -aight.
1adjectivestraightGoing in one line, with no bend or curve.~61%
“The road runs straight for twenty miles.”
2adverbdirectlyDirectly, and without stopping or turning aside.~18%
“Go straight home after school.”
3adjectivehonestHonest and plainly said, without evasion.~2%
“I asked a simple question and I would like a straight answer.”
4adjectivenothingOne after another with nothing in between.~17%
“That is four straight wins.”
5adjectivedrinkOf a drink, with nothing added.~2%
“He drinks his whisky straight.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 21 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (10 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
straight is a shape or direction.
Straight began as the past participle of the Old English verb streċċan, to stretch — so a straight thing is literally a stretched thing, the shape a rope takes when you pull both ends. The verb is still with us as stretch, and the two have simply drifted apart in spelling.
Proto-West Germanic
*strakkjan — to stretch
Old English
streċċan
Middle English
streight
English, today
straight
Built from
From Middle English streight, streght, streiȝt, the past participle of strecchen (“to stretch”), from Old English streċċan (past participle ġestreaht, ġestreht), from Proto-West Germanic strakkjan (“to stretch”). Cognate with Scots straicht (“straight”), Dutch gestrekt (“stretched”), German gestreckt (“stretched”), Danish strakt (“stretched”), Faroese - and nrn strekti (“stretched”), Icelandic strekkti (“stretched”), Norwegian strekte (“stretched”), Swedish sträckte (“stretched”). Doublet of straught. Equivalent to stretch + ed. In some senses, conflated with strait (“narrow, constricted”), which is from Latin strictus via Old French estreit.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA