Undertake

How to spell undertake

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce undertake

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does undertake mean?

1. verbTo commit oneself to and begin a task, project, or responsibility.

Undertake in a sentence

• The firm agreed to undertake a full review of its safety procedures.

• Few people are willing to undertake such a demanding renovation alone.

Where does undertake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native compound that took shape in Middle English around the 1200s, joining the everyday preposition 'under' to the verb 'take'. The 'take' element is itself a borrowing from Old Norse 'taka', meaning to grasp, seize, or get hold of, which Norse settlers planted firmly into northern English speech. The 'under' part carries the old idea of taking something on as a load placed upon your shoulders, much as you might 'shoulder' a responsibility today. From that literal picture the word settled into its modern sense of formally committing yourself to a task or accepting a duty. A familiar relative is the noun 'undertaker', which once meant simply a person who undertook any job, before it narrowed in the 1600s to the specialist who arranges funerals. The spelling is reassuringly plain, since both halves are common words, but writers sometimes pause over whether it is one word, and it is always written solid.

How the word is built

• under- (beneath, in the sense of taking on as a burden)
• take (from Old Norse taka, to grasp or seize)