Bid

How to spell bid

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bid

What does bid mean?

1. verbTo offer a particular amount as the price one is willing to pay, especially at an auction or in competition for work.
2. nounAn offer of a price, or an attempt to achieve or win something.
3. verbTo command, request, or express a wish or greeting to someone.

Bid in a sentence

• verb

  Three firms plan to bid for the construction contract.

• noun

  The company submitted the highest bid for the property.

• verb

  The guests rose to bid their host goodnight.

• verb

  Collectors were eager to bid on the rare stamp.

• noun

  His bid for the leadership of the party failed narrowly.

• verb

  The servants did exactly as they were bid by the master.

Where does bid come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This short word carries the weight of two separate Old English verbs that gradually collapsed into one spelling. The first was bēodan, meaning 'to offer, proclaim, or command', and the second was biddan, meaning 'to ask, beg, or pray'. Because their forms drifted close together over the centuries, modern English 'bid' inherited both bundles of meaning, which is why we can 'bid' at an auction (offer), 'bid' someone farewell (proclaim), and read older texts where we 'do as we are bid' (command). The Germanic root behind bēodan is also the ancestor of words like 'forbid', and the praying sense of biddan survives quietly in the term 'beads', which once meant the prayers counted on a string. The spelling stayed mercifully simple, a single short vowel between two consonants, so the trap here is meaning rather than letters.

How the word is built

• bid (single root; from Old English bēodan 'to offer, command' and biddan 'to ask, pray', two verbs that later merged in form)