Skate

How to spell skate

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce skate

What does skate mean?

1. verbTo glide along on ice skates or roller skates.
2. nounA boot fitted with a blade or wheels for moving over ice or a smooth surface.
3. nounA flat, ray-like sea fish with broad wing-shaped fins, often eaten as food.

Skate in a sentence

• verb

  The children love to skate on the frozen pond every winter.

• noun

  One blade on his skate had come loose during the match.

• noun

  The fishmonger recommended a fresh skate for the evening meal.

• verb

  He learned to skate backwards during his hockey training.

• noun

  She tightened the laces on each skate before stepping onto the ice.

• noun

  Battered skate wing is a popular dish in coastal chip shops.

Where does skate come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The skating sense arrived in English in the 1600s from the Dutch schaats, a word for the bladed footwear that let people glide across frozen canals, and the Dutch in turn took it from an Old French term descended from Latin scabellum, meaning a little stool or footrest. English speakers misheard the Dutch plural schaats as already plural and trimmed it to the singular skate, which is why the modern word looks the way it does. The fish called a skate has a completely separate ancestry: it comes from the Old Norse skata, a name for that broad, flat ray-like fish, and entered northern English and Scots dialects through Viking contact. So two unrelated words, one Dutch and one Norse, happen to share the same spelling today. The blade sense soon expanded from ice to wheeled roller skates and then to the everyday verb for gliding along, while the fish sense stayed firmly on the fishmonger's slab.

How the word is built

• Single root word with no prefix or suffix; from Dutch schaats (the boot blade) and, for the fish sense, Old Norse skata