Other forms: gates
A gate is the door in a wall or a fence that you go through to reach a garden, a field or a yard. The one that squeaks, the one you have to lift a little to close, the one with a sign about the dog.
At an airport the gate is the numbered door where you board — boarding at gate 42, and the screen announcing that it has changed. Gates control flow everywhere: a lock gate on a canal, a flood gate, the starting gates at a racecourse. In British football the gate is the crowd that paid to come in, as in a gate of twelve thousand. And ever since Watergate, -gate gets glued to the end of any scandal at all, from a stolen recipe to a rigged vote.
1noungateA hinged barrier in a wall or fence that you open to pass through.
“Please shut the gate behind you or the sheep get out.”
2nounairportThe numbered door at an airport where passengers board a plane.
“Our gate changed twice before we finally boarded.”
3nouncontrolsA barrier that controls the flow of water, animals or traffic.
“They opened the lock gate and the water poured through.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Old English ġeat came from Proto-Germanic *gatą, which meant a hole or an opening. The gate was the gap in the wall first, and the swinging thing that fills the gap took the name afterwards. Dutch gat still means hole.
Middle English
gate
English, today
gate
From Middle English gate. From Middle English gate (the forms ȝate and ȝeat yielded the dialectal doublet yate), from the plural of Old English ġeat (specifically gatu), from Proto-West Germanic gat, from Proto-Germanic gatą (“hole, opening”). See also Old Norse gat, Swedish - and Dutch gat, Low German Gaat, Gööt.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA