Plate

How to spell plate

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce plate

What does plate mean?

1. nounA flat, shallow dish from which food is served or eaten.
2. verbTo coat a surface with a thin layer of metal, such as gold or silver.
3. nounA flat sheet of metal used in construction, printing, or armour.

Plate in a sentence

• noun

  She stacked every plate neatly in the cupboard after dinner.

• verb

  The jeweller can plate the cheap ring in real gold.

• noun

  The engineer welded a steel plate over the hole in the hull.

• noun

  He filled his plate with roast vegetables and rice.

• verb

  Workers plate the steel parts to stop them rusting.

• noun

  Each printing plate carried one colour of the image.

Where does plate come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek platus, meaning 'flat' or 'broad', which passed into Latin and gave the Medieval Latin plata, used for a flat sheet of metal. Old French took this up as plate, and English borrowed it during the 1200s, at first for a thin flat piece of metal such as the metal sheets that made up a suit of armour. From that idea of a flat surface the meaning broadened to cover the shallow round dish we eat from, and later still the photographic and printing senses, where an image sits on a flat plate. The very same flat-and-broad root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'plateau', 'platypus' (literally 'flat-foot') and 'platform'. Because the spelling is so regular, the word is an easy one, but it usefully reminds us how a single notion of flatness spread across cookware, armour and geology.

How the word is built

• plate (from Latin/Greek platus: flat, broad)