Mate

How to spell mate

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mate

What does mate mean?

1. nounA friend or companion, used as an informal term of address chiefly in British and Australian English.
2. nounOne of a pair of animals or people joined for breeding or as a spouse.
3. verbTo pair for breeding, or to bring animals together for that purpose.
4. nounIn chess, a position of checkmate that ends the game.

Mate in a sentence

• noun

  He went to the pub with his old school mate.

• noun

  The swan searched the lake for its lost mate.

• verb

  The farmer chose spring as the best time to mate the cattle.

• noun

  She announced mate after trapping the king in the corner.

• noun

  My old university mate still visits every summer.

• noun

  Each penguin returns to the same mate every season.

Where does mate come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word mate came into English in the late 1300s from Middle Low German mate or gemate, meaning a companion or messmate, literally someone who shares your meals at the same table. That sense traces back to the same Germanic root that gave English the word 'meat', which once meant food in general rather than flesh specifically, so a mate was originally a fellow eater. From the idea of a shared table the meaning broadened to any close associate, then to a working partner aboard a ship, and later to a breeding partner or spouse. In British and Australian usage it settled into a warm, everyday term for a friend, while the verb sense for the pairing of animals developed separately from the same companion idea. The chess term mate is a different thread entirely, a clipping of 'checkmate' from Persian by way of Arabic and French, even though the spellings have ended up identical.

How the word is built

• mate (from Middle Low German mate/gemate, a messmate or one who eats at the same table)
• no affix