Other forms: swayed, swaying, sways
To sway is to rock slowly from side to side without moving your feet. Tall trees in wind, a crowd at a concert, a lamp hanging in a ship's cabin, a tired man on the last train.
The same verb covers changing minds: a closing speech can sway a jury, and an advert exists to sway you. As a noun, sway means influence, and it lives almost entirely in one phrase — hold sway over. Keep it apart from swing: a thing on a rope or a hinge swings, but a thing rooted at the bottom sways. It goes with gentle words too — gently, slightly, in time to the music.
1verbswayTo move slowly from side to side.~11%
“The branches swayed in the wind.”
2verbpersuadeTo change someone's opinion or decision.~11%
“Nothing you say will sway him now.”
3nounpowerPower or influence over people.~78%
“The old families still hold sway in the village.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Sway grew out of an older English verb swey, 'to fall, to swoon', from Middle English sweyen and Old English swǣġan, 'to bend, bow'. The Germanic family leans towards dizziness: a Lithuanian relative means to go giddy. The bending came first, and the noun meaning influence came out of the verb long afterwards.
Proto-Indo-European
*sweh₁-
Proto-Germanic
*swaigijaną
Proto-West Germanic
*swaigijan
Old English
*swǣġan — to bend, bow
Middle English
sweyen
English, today
sway
Built from
From earlier swey (“to fall, swoon”), from Middle English sweyen, from Old English swǣġan (“to bend, bow”), from Proto-West Germanic swaigijan, from Proto-Germanic swaigijaną, from Proto-Indo-European sweh₁- See also stq swooie (“to swing, wave, wobble”); also Lithuanian svaĩgti (“to become giddy or dizzy”), the second element of ae 𐬞𐬀𐬌𐬭𐬌𐬱𐬑𐬎𐬀𐬑𐬙𐬀 (“to surround”), Sanskrit स्वजते (“he embraces, enfolds”). The noun derived from the verb.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA