# height

Pronunciation: US say "HYT" /haɪt/; UK

## Noun

1. How tall a person, animal, or thing is, measured from the base or the ground to the top; a horse is measured to the withers.
   - Simple: How tall someone or something is, measured from the bottom to the top.
   - _The doctor recorded the patient's height and weight before the exam._
   - _The vet measured the mare's height at the withers and found she stood fifteen hands._
2. The vertical distance between something and the ground, or between it and another chosen level.
   - Simple: How far up something is above the ground or another level.
   - _The drone hovered at a height of fifty meters above the field._
   - _Climbers felt the thin air more sharply at that height._
3. The highest point or the maximum degree that something reaches.
   - Simple: The strongest or most extreme point of something.
   - _The festival was at the height of its popularity that summer._
   - _Tensions reached their height just before the two sides signed the deal._
4. A high place or area of raised ground, such as a hill, a mountain, or land above a cliff; often plural, as in 'a fear of heights'.
   - Simple: A high place, like a hill, a mountain, or the top of a cliff.
   - _The fortress was built on a height overlooking the river._
   - _The army camped on a wooded height overlooking the harbor, where it could watch every ship that came in._
5. The perpendicular distance from a vertex of a triangle to the line containing the opposite side.
   - Simple: The distance from a triangle's corner to the line through the opposite side, measured at a right angle to that line.
   - _She dropped a perpendicular line to measure the triangle's height._
   - _In an obtuse triangle the height can fall outside the figure itself._
6. The amplitude of a sinusoid: its maximum displacement from the central axis.
   - Simple: The size of a wave, measured from its middle line to its top.
   - _When the sine wave's height doubled, each peak rose twice as far above the center line._
   - _Engineers adjusted the height of the output waveform to match the target level._

## Other meanings

- (noun) A quality of vowels indicating the vertical position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth, corresponding in practice to the first formant.

## Origin

From Middle English heighte, from Old English hēahþu ("height"), going back through Proto-West Germanic *hauhiþu to Proto-Germanic *hauhiþō. It is essentially "high" plus an abstract noun suffix, and is related to Dutch hoogte and Old Norse hæð.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/height (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).