Sat

How to spell sat

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sat

What does sat mean?

1. verbPast tense of sit: rested with the body supported by the buttocks rather than standing.

Sat in a sentence

• She sat quietly at the back of the meeting room.

• The children sat on the floor while the story was read.

Where does sat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'sit', which comes from the Old English sittan, meaning 'to be seated' or 'to rest on something'. The past tense form was sæt in Old English, and it has come down to modern English with very little change beyond the loss of the older vowel spelling. The whole family traces back to a Proto-Germanic root setjan, which is also the ancestor of related words such as 'seat', 'settle', and the German sitzen. The same ancient root, meaning roughly 'to take a seated position', surfaces in Latin sedere and gave English borrowings like 'sedentary' and 'session'. Because it is such an old and frequently used word, 'sat' kept its short, irregular form rather than picking up a regular '-ed' ending.

How the word is built

• sat (past tense and past participle of the verb sit, from Old English sæt)