Dine

How to spell dine

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dine

What does dine mean?

1. verbTo eat dinner, especially a formal or substantial evening meal.

Dine in a sentence

• They prefer to dine at home rather than at a restaurant.

• Guests can dine in the hotel restaurant until ten o'clock.

Where does dine come from?

Language of origin: French

The word came into English in the 1200s from the Old French disner, which meant 'to eat the main meal of the day'. That French verb is thought to trace back to a Vulgar Latin reconstruction, disjejunare, literally 'to break the fast', built from the prefix dis- (undo, reverse) and jejunare (to fast). In other words, to dine was originally simply to stop fasting by eating, a sense that survives openly in the French and English word 'dinner'. Over the centuries the meal it described drifted later in the day, so that dining shifted from a morning or midday affair toward the formal evening meal we picture now. The same Latin jejunare root also gives us the adjective 'jejune', and the spelling trap with dine is mainly the silent final 'e' that lengthens the vowel and the rarer homophone 'dyne', a unit of force.

How the word is built

• dine (from Old French disner: to take the first meal); single root, no affixes