Other forms: exciting, excited, excites
To excite is to stir strong feeling or activity. Excite interest, excite the crowd, excite comment.
It is more formal than most of its family: excite interest and excite comment are the standard bookish uses, and people say get excited in speech. In physics, to excite an atom is to raise it to a higher energy state, which is a precise technical sense. Note excited, exciting, excitement; and excitable, which of a person or an animal means quick to become excited and is not a compliment.
1verbexciteTo stir strong feeling or activity.
“The film's special effects excited audiences everywhere.”
2verbraiseTo raise an atom to a higher energy state.
“An excited electron drops back within roughly a nanosecond.”
excite is a stirring up.
Latin excitare is ex-, out, plus citare, to summon — the same verb as cite, recite and incite. Exciting somebody is calling them out of their ordinary state.
Proto-Indo-European
*keyh₂-
Latin
excitō — to call out, call forth, arouse, wake up, stimulate
Old French
exciter
Middle English
exciten
English, today
excite
Built from
From Middle English exciten, from Old French exciter, from Latin excitō (“to call out, call forth, arouse, wake up, stimulate”), frequentative of excieō (“to call out, arouse, excite”), from ex (“out”) + cieō (“to call, summon”). See cite and compare to accite, concite, incite.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA