Other forms: summers
Summer is the hottest of the four seasons — June to August in Britain, December to February in Australia. Sunburn on the back of your neck, an ice cream going soft faster than you can eat it, school gates shut for six weeks.
It works as an adjective in front of almost anything seasonal: summer holiday, summer dress, summer job, summer term. Say in summer or in the summer, both are right, and last summer needs no preposition at all. Summery describes weather or clothes that feel like summer. An Indian summer is a stretch of warm weather arriving late, after autumn has already started. Poets count age in summers — she had seen eighteen summers — and midsummer is the middle of it, around the longest day.
1nounsummerThe warmest season of the year, between spring and autumn.~98%
“They spent the whole summer on the coast with their grandparents.”
2verbspendTo spend the summer somewhere.~2%
“The family summered in a rented cottage by the lake.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
summer is a season.
Summer comes down the Germanic line with its meaning untouched: Old English sumor, Proto-Germanic *sumaraz, and behind that a Proto-Indo-European root *semh₂- that already meant summer. German Sommer, Swedish sommar and Icelandic sumar are the same word. Sanskrit samā, from the same root, meant a season or a half-year — a reminder that for much of the world the year had two halves, not four quarters.
Middle English
somer
English, today
summer
From Middle English somer. From Middle English somer, sumer, from Old English sumor, from Proto-West Germanic sumar, from Proto-Germanic sumaraz, derived from Proto-Indo-European semh₂- (“summer”). Cognate with Scots somer, sumer, simer, West Frisian simmer, stq Suumer, Dutch zomer, Low German Sommer, German Sommer, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål sommer, Swedish sommar, Norwegian Nynorsk and Icelandic sumar; Welsh haf, Armenian ամ (“year”), ամառ (“summer”), Sanskrit समा (“a half-year, season, weather, year”), ae 𐬵𐬀𐬨, pal ḥʾmyn, kmr havîn, ckb ھاوین.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA