Other forms: won, winning, wins
To win is to come first and beat everyone else — the race, the match, the election, the argument at the dinner table. The whistle goes, one side has more goals, and that side has won.
Fix this first: you win a thing but you beat a person. 'We won the game' and 'we beat Liverpool', never 'we won Liverpool'. You also win a prize, a scholarship, a contract, a court case, and — more quietly — trust, respect, someone's heart. As a noun, a win is a victory: three wins in a row. The forms are irregular, win, won, won. And the word is everywhere in fixed phrases: a win-win deal suits both sides, winning ways charm people, and you can't win means whatever you do will be wrong.
1verbwinTo come first in a competition, game or election.~71%
“If we win tonight, we go top of the table.”
synonyms: triumph
2verbprizeTo get something as a prize, or by effort and merit.~6%
“She hopes to win a place at the school in Leeds.”
3nounvictoryA victory in a game or contest.~23%
“Three wins in a row put them top of the league.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Win started out meaning work. Old English winnan was to labour, to toil, even to suffer, and Proto-Germanic winnaną covered labouring, fighting and gaining all at once. Under that is the Proto-Indo-European root wenh₁-, 'to strive, wish, desire, love'. Winning kept the striving and quietly dropped the suffering.
Proto-Indo-European
*wenh₁- — to strive, wish, desire, love
Proto-Germanic
*winnaną — to swink, labour, win, gain, fight
Proto-West Germanic
*winnan
Old English
winnan — to labour, swink, toil,
Middle English
winnen
English, today
win
From Middle English winnen, from Old English winnan (“to labour, swink, toil,”) (compare Old English ġewinnan (“conquer, obtain, gain; endure, bear, suffer; be ill”)), from Proto-West Germanic winnan, from Proto-Germanic winnaną (“to swink, labour, win, gain, fight”), from Proto-Indo-European wenh₁- (“to strive, wish, desire, love”). 2 Cognate with frr wan, wane, wen, wine, wune (“to win”), stq and West Frisian winne (“to win”), cim gabènnan (“to win”), Dutch and Low German winnen (“to win”), German gewinnen (“to win”), lb gewannen (“to win”), Danish vinde (“to win”), Faroese and Icelandic vinna (“to win”), Norwegian Bokmål vinne (“to win”), Norwegian Nynorsk vinna, vinne (“to win”), Swedish vinna (“to win”), Gothic 𐍅𐌹𐌽𐌽𐌰𐌽 (“to suffer”); also Latin venus (“beauty, charm, elegance, grace; beloved, love”), Albanian vuaj, vuj (“to suffer; to endure”), Sanskrit वनोति (“to desire, like, love, wish; to gain, procure; to win; to prepare; to hurt, injure”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA