Ate

How to spell ate

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ate

What does ate mean?

1. verbThe past tense of eat: consumed food at some earlier time.

Ate in a sentence

• She ate a sandwich at her desk during the meeting.

• We ate dinner late because the train was delayed.

Where does ate come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'eat', which descends from the Old English etan, meaning 'to consume food'. The past form aet (later 'ate') belongs to a class of strong Germanic verbs that mark tense by changing the vowel rather than adding an ending, the same pattern seen in 'drink/drank' and 'give/gave'. Cousins survive across the Germanic family, including Dutch eten and German essen, all tracing back to a shared root meaning simply 'to eat'. The far older Indo-European ancestor also fed into the Latin edere, the source of words like 'edible'. The spelling trap here is purely aural: 'ate' sounds identical to the number 'eight', so writers can reach for the wrong one, and in much of Britain it is also pronounced to rhyme with 'bet', which can tempt a misspelling.

How the word is built

• ate (past tense of the verb eat, from Old English aet)

Words that sound like ate

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• eight: The cardinal number equal to seven plus one, written 8.