Other forms: visited, visiting, visits
To visit is to go and see a person or a place and spend some time there. Visit your grandmother, visit the museum, visit a website.
English uses no preposition with the verb — visit London, not visit to London — and that is the error learners make most often, because the noun does take one: a visit to London. Both the verb and the noun are entirely ordinary. Note visit with, which in American English means to have a conversation with somebody rather than to travel to them, and which sounds odd to British ears. The person doing it is a visitor, and visiting hours is the fixed phrase in hospitals.
1verbvisitTo go and see a person or place.
“We visited her every Sunday for two years.”
synonyms: call on, see, drop in on
2nounoccasionAn occasion of going to see somebody or somewhere.
“It was a short visit and nobody sat down.”
3verbwebsiteTo go to a website.
“Visit the site for full details.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
visit is a way of going to see.
Latin visitare meant to go to see, a repeated form of videre, to see — the same root as vision, evidence and view. A visit has always been a going-to-look, and the modern sense of visiting a website is nearer the original than it sounds.
Proto-Indo-European
*weyd-
French
visite
Latin
vīsitō
Old French
visiter
Middle English
visiten
English, today
visit
Built from
From Middle English visiten, from Old French visiter, from Latin vīsitō, frequentative of vīsō (“behold, survey”), from videō (“see”). Cognate with Old Saxon wīsōn (“to visit, afflict”), archaic German weisen (“to visit, afflict”). Displaced native sēċan and sōcn (“a visit”). The noun is from French visite or the verb. a doublet of visite.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA