pick

Meanings

1. 1
   verb

   To choose one or more things from a group.

   You can pick any dessert you like from the menu.

2. 2
   verb

   To pull fruit, flowers, or similar things off a plant by hand.

   In summer we go to the farm to pick strawberries.

3. 3
   noun

   The person or thing that someone has chosen.

   The young striker was the manager's first pick for the team.

4. 4
   verb

   To keep criticising or bothering someone in an unkind way.

   Stop picking on your little brother all the time.

5. 5
   noun

   A heavy tool with a wooden handle and a curved metal head pointed at both ends, used to break up hard ground or rock.

   The workers used picks to break through the rocky soil.

Multiword verbs with pick

• pick apart Phrasal verb A2

  to examine something critically and identify its faults

• pick off Phrasal verb A2

  to remove something by pulling it away from a surface

Appears in

Simplified etymology

Pick is recorded from Middle English as a variant of pike, whose earliest known sense referred to a pickaxe or similar pointed implement.

From Middle English piken, picken, pikken, from Old English *piccian, *pīcian (attested in pīcung (“a pricking”)), and pīcan, pȳcan (“to pick, prick, pluck”), both from Proto-West Germanic *pikkōn, from Proto-Germanic *pikkōną (“to pick, peck, prick, knock”), from Proto-Indo-European *bew-, *bu- (“to make a dull, hollow sound”). Doublet of pitch and peck. Cognate with Dutch pikken (“to pick”), German picken (“to pick, peck”), Old Norse pikka, pjakka (whence Icelandic pikka (“to pick, prick”), Swedish picka (“to pick, peck”)). Compare also German Low German puken (“to pick out, rip out, pull aw…

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External links

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