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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

bide.

To bear; to endure; to tolerate.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

verb/baɪd/General-American, UK/bɛɪd/Northumbria
  1. To bear; to endure; to tolerate.

    dialectal · transitive
  2. To face with resistance; to encounter; to withstand.

    archaic · transitive
  3. To dwell or reside in a location; to abide.

    archaic · dialectal · intransitive
  4. To wait; to be in expectation; to stay; to remain.

    archaic · dialectal · intransitive
  5. To wait for; to await.

    archaic · transitive
Where this word comes from

From Middle English biden, from Old English bīdan (“to stay, continue, live, remain, delay; wait for, await, expect; endure, experience, find; attain, obtain; own”), from Proto-West Germanic *bīdan (“to wait”), from Proto-Germanic *bīdaną (“to wait”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰéydʰeti, from *bʰeydʰ- (“to command, persuade, compel, trust”). Latinate cognates (via PIE) include faith and fidelity. Cognates Cognate with Scots bide (“to dwell, to live; to stay”), Alemannic German beite (“to wait”), Cimbrian paiten (“to wait”), Dutch beiden (“to wait”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål bie (“to stay, to wait”), Faroese and Icelandic bíða (“to wait”), Norwegian Nynorsk bide, bie (“to wait”), Swedish bida (“to await, to bide”), Gothic 𐌱𐌴𐌹𐌳𐌰𐌽 (beidan, “to wait”).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.