Date

How to spell date

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce date

What does date mean?

1. nounA particular day identified by its number, month, and year.
2. nounA social or romantic appointment, or the person one meets for it.
3. verbTo mark something with a time, or to be in a romantic relationship with someone.
4. nounThe sweet, sticky brown fruit of the date palm.

Date in a sentence

• noun

  The contract clearly states the delivery date in bold print.

• noun

  They went on their first date at a small restaurant downtown.

• verb

  Remember to date each cheque before you post it.

• noun

  The recipe calls for a single chopped date to sweeten the porridge.

• noun

  Please confirm the date of the meeting before booking the room.

• noun

  She cancelled the dinner date because of a work emergency.

Where does date come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The calendar sense of date traces back to the Latin verb dare, meaning 'to give'. Roman letters were customarily closed with the phrase data Romae, literally 'given at Rome', followed by the day on which the document was handed over, and the participle data 'given' eventually came to stand for the time-stamp itself. The word passed into English through Old French date during the 1300s, keeping that idea of a moment fixed in time. The fruit called a date is a quite separate word: it comes from the Greek daktylos, meaning 'finger', because the long fruit was thought to resemble one. The romantic sense, an arranged social meeting, is a much later American development from the late 1800s, growing naturally out of the idea of an appointment set for a particular day.

How the word is built

• date (single root, no affixes; from Latin data 'given')