Other forms: eating, eaten, ate, eats
Eat is what you do with food: you put it in your mouth, chew it, and swallow. A bowl of cereal standing at the kitchen counter, a sandwich eaten over the keyboard, the last cold chip in the bag.
The verb is irregular — eat, ate, eaten — and the -ing form carries a lot: eating out, eating habits, an eating disorder. Eat also means simply to have a meal: we eat at seven, come and eat. Things that are not people eat too, slowly and destructively: rust eats through the bodywork, debt eats into your savings, damp eats away at the plaster. Eat up means finish what is on your plate. And if someone asks what is eating you, they want to know what is bothering you.
1verbeatTo take food into the mouth, chew it and swallow it.~86%
“He eats an apple on the walk to the station every morning.”
2verbmealTo have a meal.~12%
“We eat at seven on weekdays and later at the weekend.”
3verbcorrodeTo destroy or wear something away bit by bit.~2%
“The salt air had been eating at the metal railings for years.”
synonyms: corrode, erode
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Eat has barely moved in fifteen hundred years: Old English etan, from Proto-Germanic *etaną, from a Proto-Indo-European root *h₁ed- that already meant to eat. Its relatives are still recognisable across the North Sea — Dutch eten, German essen, Danish æde. Few words have held the same job for so long with so little wear.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁ed-
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁édti
Proto-Germanic
*etaną — to eat
Proto-West Germanic
*etan
Old English
etan — to eat
Middle English
eten
English, today
eat
Built from
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”). 2 Cognate with Scots ait (“to eat”), yol ayth, eight (“to eat”), frr iidj, iit, ää'e, ääre, ääse (“to eat”), stq iete, íete (“to eat”), West Frisian ite (“to eat”), gsw asse, assu, essen, ässe, ässä (“to eat”), bar eisn, essn, èssn (“to eat”), cim èssan, èzzan (“to eat”), Dutch and Low German eten (“to eat”), German essen (“to eat”), lb iessen (“to eat”), mhn èssn (“to eat”), wym aosa (“to eat”), Yiddish עסן (“to eat”), Danish æde (“to eat”), ovd 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 (“to eat”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA