Other forms: summits
The summit is the very top of a mountain — the point where there is nothing above you but sky.
Politics borrowed it for a meeting of heads of government, and that is now the commoner use: a climate summit, an emergency summit. The logic is the same, the people at the top talking directly to each other. In the mountain sense the verb exists too — they summited on the third morning — though that is climbers' language rather than general English.
1nounsummitThe highest point of a mountain.~39%
“They reached the summit an hour before dark.”
2nounmeetingA meeting between heads of government.~59%
“The summit ended without an agreement.”
3nounanythingFiguratively, the highest point of anything that is not a mountain — of a career, a scale, an achievement.~2%
“The summit of a long and difficult career.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
summit is a kind of high point.
SUM-mit → the SUM of the mountain
The last woman up steps forward, and above her there is nothing left but sky. She is standing on the sum of the whole mountain.
hooks ontosum
From Latin summus, highest — the top of the heap. The same root gives us sum, the figure you reach when everything below has been added up.
Proto-Indo-European
*upó
Proto-Indo-European
*upér — over
Latin
summum — top, summit
Old French
somet
Middle French
sommet
Anglo-Norman
sumet
Middle English
somet
English, today
summit
Built from
The noun is derived from Late Middle English somet, somete (“head, top”)somette, sommet, sommete, sommette, from Anglo-Norman sumet and Middle French sommet masculine, somete, sommette (“top of a thing; highest point of a mountain”) feminine (modern French sommet), from Old French somet, sommette, from som, sum (“highest point, summit”) + -et, -ete, -ette. Som, sum are derived from Latin summum (“top, summit”), a noun use of the neuter of summus (“greatest, highest; top, uppermost”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European upér (“over”) + -tm̥mos (“suffix forming superlative adjectives”)). The modern English spelling was influenced by summity (“height or top of a thing; utmost degree, perfection”) obsolete. The verb is derived from the noun.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA