Seat

How to spell seat

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce seat

What does seat mean?

1. nounA piece of furniture or surface made or used for sitting on.
2. verbTo place someone in a seat, or to have room for a given number of people to sit.
3. nounAn elected or official position, such as a place in a council, parliament, or governing body.

Seat in a sentence

• noun

  He reclined the driver's seat before the long motorway journey.

• verb

  The new dining hall can seat four hundred guests at once.

• noun

  The party gained a marginal seat in the northern constituency.

• noun

  Every seat in the theatre was taken by the time the play began.

• verb

  The usher will seat latecomers only during a break in the performance.

• noun

  She resigned her seat on the board after twelve years of service.

Where does seat come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Seat came into English around the year 1200 from the Old Norse word saeti, which simply meant 'a place to sit' or 'a position'. That Norse noun grew from the same ancient root that gives us the verb 'sit', and the family stretches across the Germanic languages, so seat is closely related to German 'sitzen' and to English words like 'settle' and 'saddle'. The original idea was concrete (the actual surface you rest on), but the sense quickly broadened to cover a position one holds, which is why a person can occupy a seat in parliament or a company can have its seat (its official headquarters) in a particular city. The spelling keeps the 'ea' vowel that older English used for this long sound, the same pattern seen in 'meat', 'heat', and 'beat'. For most adults the only trap is choosing 'ea' rather than 'ee', since the word rhymes neatly with 'feet'.

How the word is built

• seat (from Old Norse saeti: a place to sit), a native-feeling noun and verb with no affixes