Slate

How to spell slate

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce slate

What does slate mean?

1. nounA fine-grained grey rock that splits into thin flat sheets, used for roofing and once for writing tablets.
2. verbTo plan or schedule something for a particular time.
3. verbTo criticise someone or something very harshly, especially in print.

Slate in a sentence

• noun

  The old cottage still has its original slate roof.

• verb

  The committee will slate the next review for early spring.

• verb

  Reviewers tend to slate films that recycle the same tired plot.

• noun

  Each broken tile of slate had to be replaced individually.

• verb

  Managers hope to slate the product launch before the holidays.

• verb

  The newspaper will surely slate the council for the wasted budget.

Where does slate come from?

Language of origin: French

Slate came into English in the 1300s from the Old French word esclate, meaning 'a thin piece of split stone', which was the feminine form of esclat, 'a splinter' or 'a fragment broken off'. That French word ultimately traces back to a Frankish (Germanic) root meaning 'to split or shatter', the same family that gives us the modern word 'slat'. The connection to splitting is no accident: slate is a rock that naturally cleaves into flat, thin sheets, which is exactly why it became the standard material for roofing tiles and for the small writing boards once used in schools. From those writing boards came the figurative sense of a 'clean slate', a fresh start with nothing yet written down. The verb meanings developed later: the idea of listing names on a slate produced the sense 'to schedule or plan', while the British informal sense 'to criticise harshly' grew out of the notion of marking someone down.

How the word is built

• slate (a single root word, from Old French esclate 'a split piece of stone'); no prefix or suffix