: a piece of furniture on or in which to lie and sleep
Like so many of the small and tidy members of the English language, bed has developed numerous meanings over its more than eight centuries of use. The meaning that likely springs to mind for most of us when confronted by the word without context is its oldest: that blessed piece of furniture where we get to rest our weary selves.
Bed has its origins in the Old English word bedd, which means "sleeping place" or "plot of ground prepared for plants." The likely Germanic origin of bedd is badja, which has traditionally been taken to be a derivative of an Indo-European verbal base meaning "poke, dig," with the assumption being that the beds of our linguistic ancestors were lowly pits dug in the ground. There is, however, no evidence that early Germanic or pre-Germanic people slept in pits, bless their hearts.