eat
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
3 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "eat", 3-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "eat" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "eat" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
eat is aEnglishverb. It means: To ingest; to be ingested. Pronounced /iːt/. It ranks #765 in English word frequency. Often confused with ex and ed.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | eat |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /iːt/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #765 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for eat is 3 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /iːt/. Corpus data places it at rank #765 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 15 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for eat in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "ex", "ed", "et", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English eten, from Old English etan (“to eat”), from Proto-West Germanic *etan, from Proto-Germanic *etaną (“to eat”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁édti, from *h₁ed- (“to eat”). Cognates Cognate with Scots ait (“to eat”), Yola ayth, eight (“to ea… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is eat, spelled E-A-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To ingest; to be ingested.
- 2To ingest; to be ingested.
- 3To ingest; to be ingested.
- 4To ingest; to be ingested.
- 5To use up.
- 6To use up.
- 7To use up.
- 8To use up.
- 9To cause (someone) to worry.
- 10To take the loss in a transaction.
- 11To be injured or killed by (something such as a firearm or its projectile), especially in the mouth.
- 12To corrode or erode.
- 13To perform oral sex (on a person or body part).
- 14To be very good; to rule, to slay.
- 15To annex.
Etymology
From Middle English eten, from Old English etan (“to eat”), from Proto-West Germanic *etan, from Proto-Germanic *etaną (“to eat”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁édti, from *h₁ed- (“to eat”). Cognates Cognate with Scots ait (“to eat”), Yola ayth, eight (“to eat”), North Frisian iidj, iit, ää'e, ääre, ääse (“to eat”), Saterland Frisian iete, íete (“to eat”), West Frisian ite (“to eat”), Alemannic German asse, assu, essen, ässe, ässä (“to eat”), Bavarian eisn, essn, èssn (“to eat”), Cimbrian èssan, èzzan (“to eat”), Dutch, Low German eten (“to eat”), German essen (“to eat”), Luxembourgish iessen (“to eat”), Mòcheno èssn (“to eat”), Vilamovian aosa (“to eat”), Yiddish עסן (esn, “to eat”), Danish æde (“to eat”), Elfdalian jätå (“to eat”), Faroese eta (“to eat”), Icelandic eta, éta (“to eat”), Norwegian Bokmål ete (“to eat”), Norwegian Nynorsk eta, ete, åtå (“to eat”), Swedish äta (“to eat”), Gothic 𐌹𐍄𐌰𐌽 (itan, “to eat”).
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #765 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter E in our English index: