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heed

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈhiːd//
  • /[ˈhɪi̯d]/

Careful attention.

noun

  1. 1

    Careful attention.

    Then for a few minutes I did not pay much heed to what was said, being terribly straitened for room, and cramped with pain from lying so long in one place.

Etymology

From Middle English heden, from Old English hēdan (“to heed, take care, observe, attend, guard, take charge, take possession, receive”), from Proto-West Germanic *hōdijan (“to heed, guard”), from Proto-Indo-European *kadʰ- (“to heed, protect”). Cognate with West Frisian hoedje (“to heed”), Dutch hoeden (“to heed”), German hüten (“to heed”).

verb

  1. 1

    obsoleteTo guard, protect.

  2. 2

    To mind; to regard with care; to take notice of; to attend to; to observe.

    With pleasure Argus the musician heeds.

    "It comes back to me that I wanted to say something to the driver and that I couldn't make him heed me."

    The help tended to be officious, the rules, if heeded, restrictive, and the management meddlesome.

    Tolokonnikova not only tried to adjust to life in the penal colony but she even tried to heed the criticism levied at her by colony representatives during a parole hearing.

  3. 3

    archaicTo pay attention, care.

Forms

past tense
heeded
past participle
heeded
present participle
heeding
third person singular
heeds
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).