Other forms: donated, donating, donates
To donate is to hand over money or goods freely to help a cause. Donate to charity, donate blood, donated by a local firm.
The construction is donate something to somebody. It is slightly more formal than give and implies a cause rather than a person. Donate blood and donate an organ are the medical uses. Note donation and donor; that donate was back-formed from donation in nineteenth-century America and was disliked as an ugly novelty for about a century; and Gift Aid, which lets British charities reclaim tax on what is donated.
1verbdonateTo hand over money or goods freely to help a cause.
“We donated our old clothes to a charity shop.”
synonyms: give, contribute
donate is a giving.
Also accepted in games: give
Latin donare means to give, from donum, a gift. English had donation for four hundred years before anybody cut a verb out of it, which is why donate was once considered a mistake.
Proto-Indo-European
*deh₃-
Latin
dono — to give
English, today
donate
Circa 1845, back-formation from donation on the basis of -ate, chiefly found in American English. Ultimately from Latin dono (“to give”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA