Chat

How to spell chat

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce chat

What does chat mean?

1. verbTo talk in an easy, informal, and friendly way.
2. nounA friendly, informal conversation.

Chat in a sentence

• verb

  The neighbours like to chat over the garden fence on summer evenings.

• noun

  She stopped by my desk for a quick chat about the weekend.

• verb

  We can chat about the project over coffee before the meeting.

• noun

  The manager invited each new hire in for an informal chat.

Where does chat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Chat is a clipped form of the older English verb chatter, which appeared in Middle English around the 1200s as chateren. That longer word was echoic, meaning it was coined to imitate the rapid, repetitive noise of light talk or of birds and small animals, much like babble or twitter. By the middle of the 1400s speakers had trimmed chatter down to the brisk single syllable chat for the sense of talking idly and pleasantly. The noun use, meaning a friendly informal conversation, followed naturally and was well established by the 1500s. In the modern era the word leapt into computing, where to chat online or to open a chat window simply reapplied the centuries-old idea of casual back-and-forth talk.

How the word is built

• chat (a self-contained word, shortened from chatter)