Other forms: later, latest
Late means after the time something was meant to happen. The bus that arrives at 8:15 when the board says 8:03, a birthday card that lands in June, a guest turning up when the soup has gone cold.
Late is its own adverb — she arrived late, the train ran late — and lately is a different word meaning recently, which is the mistake nearly everyone makes once. It also means near the end of a stretch of time: late afternoon, late thirties, the late 1990s, late in the game. Put 'the late' in front of a person's name and it says they have died: her late husband, the late Sir Edward. Later means afterwards, the latest means the newest, and 'of late' is a formal way of saying recently. Better late than never is what you will hear when you finally get round to it.
1adjectivelateArriving or happening after the expected time.~2%
“The train was twenty minutes late.”
2adverbusualAfter the expected or usual time.~2%
“He got there late and missed the introductions.”
3adjectiveendNear the end of a period of time.~94%
“We met on a late September afternoon.”
4adjectiveplacedPlaced before a name to say that the person has died.~2%
“The house belonged to her late father.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English læt meant slow, slack and negligent as much as late, and it sits on Proto-Germanic *lataz, 'slow, lazy'. The cousins kept the lazy half: Swedish lat and Icelandic latur both mean lazy, and German lass means sluggish. English kept the clock half, so being late now says nothing about how fast you walk.
Proto-Germanic
*lataz — slow, lazy
Proto-West Germanic
*lat
Old English
læt — slow; slack, lax, negligent; late
Middle English
late
English, today
late
From Middle English late, lat, from Old English læt (“slow; slack, lax, negligent; late”), from Proto-West Germanic lat, from Proto-Germanic lataz (“slow, lazy”). by surface analysis, en + let. 2 Cognate with yol laate (“late”), frr leed, leet, lääs (“late”), stq leet (“late”), Dutch -, German Low German laat (“late, tardy”), German lass (“lazy, sluggish”), Danish lad (“languid, lazy, indolent”), Faroese -, Icelandic latur (“lazy”), Norwegian Bokmål -, Norwegian Nynorsk - and Swedish lat (“lazy”), Gothic 𐌻𐌰𐍄𐍃 (“lazy, slothful”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA