Eat

How to spell eat

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce eat

What does eat mean?

1. verbTo put food into the mouth and swallow it for nourishment.

Eat in a sentence

• The children prefer to eat dinner before seven o'clock.

• Doctors advise patients to eat more vegetables each day.

Where does eat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is one of the oldest words in English, descending directly from the Old English verb etan, meaning 'to take food'. It traces back through the ancient Germanic root that also gave German essen and Dutch eten, and ultimately to a very old Indo-European root ed- that carried the same plain meaning of eating. Because it is a native Germanic survivor rather than a borrowing, it kept its irregular past forms, giving us the unusual 'ate' and 'eaten' rather than a tidy 'eated'. The same ancient root quietly survives in the Latin edere 'to eat', which is the source of the more formal English word 'edible'. The spelling settled into the simple 'ea' pattern in the early modern period, which is why a word everyone knows still carries a vowel pair that can briefly puzzle a careful writer.

How the word is built

• eat (single Old English root verb, no affixes)