Other forms: suggested, suggests, suggesting
When you suggest something, you put an idea in front of other people to think about. Somebody suggests pizza when nobody can decide; a colleague suggests the back road to miss the roadworks.
Suggest is softer than tell and lighter than insist, which is why it fills polite emails: may I suggest, as you suggested, I suggest we wait until Friday. It also works with no person behind it — evidence suggests, the figures suggest, her face suggested she had heard it all before — meaning something points that way without saying so outright. The noun is suggestion, and the phrase to keep is at your suggestion. Now the grammar trap, and it catches nearly everybody: you cannot suggest somebody to do something. Say suggest doing it, or suggest that he does it, or just suggest it.
1verbsuggestTo put an idea or plan forward for others to consider.~17%
“She suggested meeting at the station instead.”
synonyms: propose, put forward
2verbrecommendTo recommend someone or something as suitable.~2%
“Can you suggest a good dentist near here?”
3verbseemTo make something seem likely; to point towards a conclusion.~79%
“The marks on the door suggest somebody forced it.”
4verbmindTo put an idea into someone's mind without saying it directly.~2%
“His tone suggested he had made up his mind hours ago.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 22 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: propose
Suggest is Latin sub, 'under', plus gerō, 'to carry': suggerō, to carry something up from underneath. That is the manoeuvre exactly. You slide an idea in from below rather than setting it down in front of somebody, and they can still decide the idea was theirs.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂eǵ-
Latin
suggestus
English, today
suggest
Built from
Coined based on Latin suggestus, perfect passive participle of suggerō (“bring up, bring under, lay beneath, furnish, supply, excite, advise, suggest”), from sub (“from below, under”) + gerō (“bear, carry”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA