There is a linguistic connection between the words Wait, Expect, Hope, and the term Wish for. In fact, many Romance languages (languages with Latin in their background) use the same word for these terms. In languages like Spanish, French, Portuguese Italian, etc. (Esperar, Sperare, Espere...) The intended meaning is found in context, most of the time.
In English, we get many words from these languages and those words very often go all the way to Latin.