Designate

How to spell designate

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce designate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does designate mean?

1. verbTo officially assign a name, role, or status to someone or something.
2. adjectiveAppointed to an office or role but not yet formally installed in it; usually placed after the noun.

Designate in a sentence

• verb

  The committee will designate one room as the quiet study area.

• adjective

  The chair designate attended the meeting but did not yet vote.

• verb

  The council plans to designate the old mill as a protected building.

• adjective

  As director designate, she shadowed the outgoing head for a month.

Where does designate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb designare, which meant 'to mark out' or 'to point out', built from the prefix de-, here acting as an intensifier meaning 'completely', and signare, 'to mark', which itself comes from signum, the Latin noun for a sign or mark. So at its root the word literally describes the act of marking something out so that it stands apart from everything around it, and that core idea of singling out by a clear mark survives in the modern sense of formally naming or appointing. English took it up in the seventeenth century, at first as an adjective and then firmly as a verb, drawing directly on the Latin past participle designatus. The same signum lies behind a whole family of relatives such as 'sign', 'signal', 'signature' and 'design', and noticing that buried 'sign' is the surest way to remember the spelling, since the silent run of letters in the middle is exactly the word sign with its g intact. Keeping that g in mind guards against the common slip of writing the word as it sounds.

How the word is built

• de- (out, completely)
• sign (mark, from Latin signum)
• -ate (verb-forming suffix)