Other forms: swallows, swallowed, swallowing
To swallow is to let something go down your throat. A mouthful of tea, the last of the bread, a pill you would rather not take — you chew, you swallow, and it is gone.
The word does a great deal of work away from the table. You swallow your pride, swallow an insult, swallow the answer you were about to give: take it in and let it go down without a word. You swallow a story when you believe something you should not, and a lie that will not go down is hard to swallow. Swallow is a noun as well, one movement of the throat — there was a swallow of tea left in the cup. And then there is the other swallow altogether, spelled the same by accident: the small blue-black bird with the forked tail that comes back every spring and gave English one swallow doesn't make a summer.
1verbswallowTo make food or drink go down your throat.~25%
“He swallowed the pill with a mouthful of water.”
2verbacceptTo accept something false or unpleasant without arguing.~2%
“Nobody swallowed his excuse about the traffic.”
3nounsmallA small bird with long pointed wings and a forked tail, seen in summer.~69%
“Two swallows were sitting on the wire outside the barn.”
4nounmovementOne movement of the throat, or the amount taken in one go.~4%
“There was a swallow of tea left in the bottom of the cup.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 135 sentences found in the wild and placed 80 of them on a sense (55 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
s-WALL-ow → a WALL
A whole garden wall stands on your dinner plate. You open your mouth wide and the wall goes down stone by stone, quietly, until the plate is clean and your throat is full of garden.
hooks ontowall
Two different words wore down into one spelling. The verb goes back to Old English swelgan and a Germanic word, swelganą, that covered swallowing, revelling and devouring all at once, from a root meaning to gulp — the same family gave English swill. The bird is no relation whatever: Old English swealwe, a separate word with a separate history, which arrived at the same seven letters by pure accident and has been sitting in them ever since.
Proto-Indo-European
*swelk- — to gulp
Proto-Germanic
*swelganą — to swallow, revel, devour
Proto-West Germanic
*swelgan
Old English
swelgan
Middle English
swolwen
English, today
swallow
From Middle English swolwen, from Old English swelgan, from Proto-West Germanic swelgan, from Proto-Germanic swelganą (“to swallow, revel, devour”), from Proto-Indo-European swelk- (“to gulp”). Cognate with Dutch zwelgen (“to revel, carouse, guzzle”), German schwelgen (“to delight, indulge”), Danish svælge (“to swallow”), Norwegian Bokmål svelge (“to swallow”), Norwegian Nynorsk svelgje (“to swallow”), Swedish svälja (“to swallow, gulp”), Faroese svølgja (“to swallow”), Icelandic svelgja (“to swallow”), Old English swillan, swilian (“to swill, wash out, gargle”). See also swill. The noun is from Middle English swolow, swolwe, from Old English swelh, swelg (“gulf, chasm”) and ġeswelge (“gulf, chasm, abyss, whirlpool”), both from Proto-West Germanic swelg, swalgi, from Proto-Germanic swelgaz, swalgiz. Cognate with Old English swiliġe (“pit”), Scots swelch, swellie, swallie (“an abyss in the sea, whirpool”), Middle Low German swelch (“whirlpool, eddy”), Dutch zwelg (“gorge, chasm, gullet, throat”), Old Norse svelgr (“whirlpool, current, stream”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA