Other forms: thicker, thickest
Thick means there is a lot of distance between one side of something and the other. A thick winter coat, a thick slice of bread, a book so thick you cannot hold it open with one hand.
It also covers whatever is dense or hard to get through: thick fog, thick hair, thick forest, soup thick enough to stand a spoon in. Measurements go in front of it — the wall is two metres thick, the ice was thick enough to walk on. The noun is thickness and the verb is thicken, which is what a sauce does on the heat. English keeps a shelf of phrases here: through thick and thin means in good times and bad, thick as thieves means very close, in the thick of it means in the busiest part. In British English, calling a person thick means calling them stupid, so keep it away from people.
1adjectivethickHaving a large distance between opposite sides.~87%
“He cut a thick slice of bread and buttered it to the edges.”
2adjectivedenseDense; hard to see through or move through.~7%
“The fog was so thick we could not find the gate.”
3adjectiveliquidOf a liquid: not flowing easily.~2%
“Stir the sauce until it is thick enough to coat the spoon.”
4adjectiveaccentOf an accent: strong and immediately noticeable.~2%
“She answered in a thick Glasgow accent.”
5adjectiveslowSlow to understand; stupid (informal and rude, British English).~2%
“He is not thick, he simply was not listening.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English þicce meant thick or dense, from Proto-Germanic *þekuz and an Indo-European *tégus, thick. Almost nothing happened to it on the way north and west: Dutch says dik, German dick, Swedish tjock, Icelandic þykkur. It is one of those plain old words that never needed replacing.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)teg- (pole)
Proto-Indo-European
*tégus — thick
Proto-Germanic
*þekuz — thick
Proto-West Germanic
*þikkwī
Old English
þicce — thick, dense
Middle English
thikke
English, today
thick
From Middle English thikke, from Old English þicce (“thick, dense”), from Proto-West Germanic þikkwī, from Proto-Germanic þekuz (“thick”), from Proto-Indo-European tégus (“thick”). 2 Cognate with frr sjok, tjok, tjuk, tschok (“thick”), stq tjuk (“thick”), West Frisian dik, tuuk (“thick”), gmw-cfr deck (“thick”), cim dikh, dikhe (“thick”), Dutch dik (“thick”), German dick (“thick”), lb déck (“thick”), Yiddish דיק (“thick”), Danish tyk (“thick”), ovd tiokk (“thick”), Faroese tjúkkur (“thick”), Icelandic þykkur (“thick”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk tjukk, tykk (“thick”), gmq-scy tjykker (“thick”), Swedish tjock (“thick”); also kw and Welsh tew (“thick”), Irish tiubh, tiugh (“thick”), gv çhiu (“thick”), Scottish Gaelic tiugh (“thick”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA