The words gift and present are well-matched synonyms¹ that mean essentially² the same thing, but even well-matched synonyms have their own connotations and distinctive³ patterns of use.

 

在如今，gift和present是近义词，本质上表达的都是同一个东西，但是即使意思再相近的近义词，还是会有不同的词义和用法。

 

Gift applies to a wider range of situations. Gifts can be talents. You can have the gift of gab⁴, or a musical gift. Gifts can be intangibles. There is the gift of understanding or the gift of a quiet day.

 

We generally don't use present for things like this. Presents are more concrete. If your whole family gave donations to your college fund for your birthday would you say "I got a lot of presents"? It doesn't exactly sound wrong, but since you never hold these donations in your hand, gifts seem to fit better.

 

Gift can also be an attributive noun, acting⁵ like an adjective to modify another noun. What do you call the type of shop where you can buy presents for people? A gift shop. What do you call the basket of presents that you can have sent to all your employees? A gift basket. Present doesn't work well in this role of describing other nouns. We have gift boxes, gift cards, and gift wrap, not present boxes, present cards, and present wrap.

 

Gift appears to be more frequent than present, though it is difficult to get accurate counts, because if you compare occurrences of the noun present with the noun gift, you include that other noun present, meaning the here and now. However, the plural⁶ noun presents captures only the word we want. Gifts outnumbers presents in the Corpus of Contemporary American English by four to one.

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