Other forms: moats
A moat is a wide water-filled ditch around a castle. Cross the moat, the moat was dry, a moat and drawbridge.
Its real purpose was not drowning attackers but stopping them digging: a tunnel under a wall floods before it gets there. Many were dry ditches. In business a moat means a lasting advantage that competitors cannot cross.
1nounmoatA wide water-filled ditch around a castle.
“The castle is surrounded by a moat, and the only way in is over the drawbridge.”
moat is a ditch.
Old French mote first meant a mound, and the word transferred to the ditch dug around it.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)mut- — dark, dirty
Proto-Germanic
*mutô
Frankish
*mot
Medieval Latin
mota — a mound, hill
Old French
mote — mound, embankment
Middle English
mote
English, today
moat
Built from
From Middle English mote, from Old French mote (“mound, embankment”); compared also to Old French motte (“hillock, lump, clod, turf”), from Medieval Latin mota (“a mound, hill”), of gem origin, perhaps via Frankish mot, motta (“mud, peat, bog, turf”), from Proto-Germanic mutô, mudraz, muþraz (“dirt, filth, mud, swamp”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)mut- (“dark, dirty”). Cognate with gsw Mott, Mutte (“peat, turf”), bar Mott (“peat, turf”), dialectal Dutch mot (“dust, fine sand”), stq mut (“grit, litter, humus”), Swedish muta (“to drizzle”), Old English mot (“speck, particle”). More at mote, mud, smut. As term for a business strategy, popularized by American investor Warren Buffett.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA