Other forms: tighter, tightest
Tight means there is no spare room. Jeans you have to lie down to do up, a lid you cannot turn, a knot you cannot pick apart with your fingers.
It covers space, time and money as well as clothes: a tight schedule, a tight corner, a tight budget, a tight squeeze getting the sofa through the door. Pulled hard with no slack is tight too — a tight rope, a tight guitar string — and hold tight, where tight is doing the work of an adverb. In British English, calling somebody tight means they hate spending money, and it is not a compliment. The verb is tighten and the opposites are loose and slack; keep loose and lose apart in your spelling, they are different words. Sleep tight is the friendly one, and it means nothing more than sleep well.
1adjectivetightFitting closely against the body, with no room to spare.~81%
“These boots are too tight across the toes.”
synonyms: snug, close-fitting
2adjectivefixedFixed firmly and hard to move or undo.~2%
“The lid is on tight; run it under hot water.”
3adjectivepulledPulled hard, with no slack in it.~2%
“Keep the rope tight while I climb.”
4adjectivelittleWith very little space, time or money to spare.~11%
“It is a tight schedule, but the train gets in at nine.”
5adjectiveunwillingUnwilling to spend money.~2%
“He is too tight to put the heating on before November.”
6adverbfirmlyFirmly.~2%
“Hold tight and don't let go of the rail.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Tight ought to be spelled thight. Old English þiht gave Middle English thight, from Proto-Germanic *þinhtaz and Proto-Indo-European *tenkt-, dense, thick, tight, itself from *ten-, to stretch, to pull. The th turned into a plain t under the pull of the verb tighten, which came into English from somewhere else entirely. The old meaning was dense and watertight, and Dutch and German still keep that sense in dicht.
Proto-Indo-European
*tenkt- — dense, thick, tight
Proto-Germanic
*þinhtaz
Proto-West Germanic
*þį̄ht(ī)
Old English
*þiht
Middle English
tight
English, today
tight
From Middle English tight, tyght, tyȝt, tiht, variants of thight, thiht, from Old English þiht, þīht (attested in meteþiht), from Proto-West Germanic þį̄ht(ī), from Proto-Germanic þinhtaz, from Proto-Indo-European tenkt- (“dense, thick, tight”), from Proto-Indo-European ten- (“to stretch, pull”). Cognate with Scots ticht, West Frisian ticht, Danish tæt, Icelandic þéttur (“dense”), Norwegian tett, Swedish tät, Dutch dicht (“dense”), German dicht (“dense”). The current form with t- /t/ rather than etymologically-expected th- /θ/ arose in Middle English under the influence of the etymologically-unrelated verbs tighten and tight, which come from a different Proto-Indo-European root (starting with *d- and thus regularly having t-).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA