Etymologically
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eat

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Pronunciation

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English eten, inherited from Old English etan (“to consume food; devour”), past tense ǣt,[2][3] from Proto-Germanic *etaną.[2][4] Its cognates include Old Frisian eta, Old Saxon etan, Dutch eten, German essen and Old Norse eta,[3][5][6] and Gothic has itan.[2][4] Watkins traces it to Proto-Indo-European *ed- (“to eat”),[2][7] the root also of Latin edere (“to eat”), Greek ἔδω (édō) and Sanskrit ádmi “I eat”.[4][6][8] Word Origins notes that the same root gives edible and comestible.[9]

Earliest recorded meaning

To consume food: Old English etan, about 725,[3] or about 825 in the OED.[10]

Semantic evolution

“To submit to, swallow” an insult is from 1382.[10] The transferred sense “to corrode, wear away, consume” is from the 1550s.[2][11] Eat one's words is from the 1570s and eat one's heart out from the 1590s.[2] “To preoccupy, worry”, as in what's eating you?, is by 1893.[2] Eat out, “to dine away from home”, is from 1930, and the eat-in kitchen from 1955.[2] The noun eats, “food”, continues Old English ǣt (“food”) and is now colloquial.[5][12]

Timeline

  • c. 725 – Old English etan.[3]
  • 1382 – to swallow an insult.[10]
  • 1550s – to corrode.[2]
  • 1570s – eat one's words.[2]
  • 1590s – eat one's heart out.[2]
  • 1893 – to worry.[2]
  • 1930 – eat out.[2]

Modern meaning

Verb

  1. To take food into the body by the mouth and swallow it; to have a meal.
  2. To include habitually in one's diet.
  3. To consume or destroy as if by eating; to erode or corrode.
  4. To absorb a cost or loss.
  5. To worry or annoy persistently.

Noun

  1. eats (informal) Food.

Word family

  • eater
  • fret
  • ort
  • edible
  • comestible
  • etch

Usage notes

The American Heritage Dictionary compares eat with consume, devour and ingest.[13] The SOED notes the past tense ate pronounced /et/ as well as /eɪt/,[5] and the CEPD gives /et/ as the main British form.[1]

References

  1. ^ a b Jones, Daniel (2011), Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, 18th ed., ed. Peter Roach, Jane Setter and John Esling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
  3. ^ a b c d Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
  4. ^ a b c Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  5. ^ a b c Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
  6. ^ a b Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
  7. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000), 4th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin
  8. ^ Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
  9. ^ Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
  10. ^ a b c Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
  11. ^ Kay, Christian; Roberts, Jane; Samuels, Michael; Wotherspoon, Irené, eds. (2009), Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press; online edition (2024)
  12. ^ Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2003), 11th ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
  13. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1992), 3rd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin