Other forms: navigating, navigated, navigates
To navigate is to find your way through — seas, cities, or a difficult situation. Knowing where you are and where you are going next.
The original sense belongs to ships, and a navigator worked out position from stars and instruments before satellites did it instead. Cars and phones now navigate for you. The figurative use is very common and rather good, since navigating a bureaucracy or navigating a difficult conversation means steering through complications. Websites are navigated too, which is where navigation menus come from.
To navigate is to work a ship. Latin nāvigō is built on nāvis, a ship, from a Proto-Indo-European word for boat, which makes navigating a website a very long way from the water.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂eǵ-
Proto-Indo-European
*néh₂us — boat
Latin
nāvigātus
English, today
navigate
Built from
1588; Latin nāvigātus, the perfect passive participle of nāvigō (see -ate), from nāvis (“ship”) + -igō, from Proto-Indo-European néh₂us (“boat”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA