Other forms: types, typing, typed
A type is one of the kinds a group divides into. What type of car is it? Two types of bread. It is interchangeable with kind and sort in most everyday sentences.
The grammar of the three is identical and identically tricky: this type of car, these types of car, and this kind of thing. Type also means printed letters — set in type, in bold type — which is where typeface and typography come from, and the verb means to write on a keyboard, which is now its commonest use of all. Note not my type, meaning not the sort of person I am attracted to, and true to type, meaning behaving exactly as expected.
1nountypeOne of the kinds a group divides into.
“There are three types of membership.”
2verbwriteTo write using a keyboard.
“She typed the whole report in an afternoon.”
3nounprintedPrinted letters, taken as a whole.
“The small type at the bottom is the important part.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
type is a category, or a way of writing.
Greek typos meant a blow, then the mark a blow leaves, then a model or pattern. Printing took the word for the metal blocks that struck the paper, and the keyboard sense follows from those. Every meaning is still an impression made by striking something.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)tewp-
Ancient Greek
τύπος — mark, impression, type
Latin
typus
Middle English
type — symbol, figure, emblem
English, today
type
Built from
From Middle English type (“symbol, figure, emblem”), from Latin typus, from Ancient Greek τύπος (“mark, impression, type”), from τύπτω (“to strike, beat”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA