Seater

How to spell seater

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce seater

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does seater mean?

1. nounSomething, especially a vehicle, aircraft, or piece of furniture, that provides a stated number of seats, normally used after a number.

Seater in a sentence

• The dealership had a sporty two-seater in the showroom.

• They replaced the old commuter jet with a fifty-seater turboprop.

Where does seater come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The base word 'seat' came into English from Old Norse 'sæti', meaning 'a place to sit', which Norse settlers brought to England during the Viking age; it is related to the old verb 'sit' and to a wider Germanic family of sitting words. The agent and instrument suffix '-er' was then attached, a suffix English has long used to name a thing defined by what it does or holds, as in 'cooker' or 'diner'. Combined, 'seater' came to describe something that provides a stated number of seats, almost always paired with a number, as in 'two-seater' or 'four-seater'. The usage grew with the rise of motor cars and aircraft in the early twentieth century, when describing a vehicle by its seating capacity became a practical shorthand. Because the spelling simply layers a clean suffix onto the familiar word 'seat', the double vowel 'ea' and the single 't' both carry straight over, which is the small detail to keep in mind.

How the word is built

• seat (a place to sit)
• -er (noun suffix: thing characterised by)