hug

The word “hug” means to wrap your arms around someone and hold them close, usually to show affection or comfort. In plain terms, putting your arms around someone (or something staying close to something else, like a road hugging a coastline).

“Hug” is pronounced huhg (/hʌɡ/ in IPA).

Here is “hug” used in a sentence: “She hugged her friend tightly at the airport.”

Words with a similar meaning to “hug” include stick, coll and embrace.

Depending on how it is used, “hug” can be a verb and a noun.

The word “hug” comes from Old Norse. From an older English word meaning "to embrace," likely blending a word for crouching close with an Old Norse word meaning "to comfort" — ultimately tied to a root meaning "mind" or "thought.".

“Hug” is a fairly common word in modern English, usually learned at around the A2 level.

“Hug” has 3 distinct senses listed in this dictionary. The most common is: to wrap your arms around someone and hold them close, usually to show affection or comfort.

A hug and an embrace both involve wrapping your arms around someone, but embrace is the more formal, literary word, while hug is the everyday term. Embrace also has broader figurative uses, such as embracing an idea. In casual speech, hug is almost always the natural choice.

The past tense is hugged, with a double g, and the -ing form is hugging. Hug doubles its final consonant because it is a short verb ending in a single vowel plus a single consonant, following the same spelling rule as stop/stopped and plan/planned.

The natural collocation is 'give someone a hug' — English speakers do not say 'make a hug'. Other common patterns include 'get a hug', 'need a hug', and 'a big, warm, or tight hug'.