Other forms: plates
A plate is a flat round dish that you put your food on. A dinner plate, clear the plates, a plate of chips.
Plate sizes have grown considerably over the last few decades, which is one of the quiet drivers of portion size. A plate is also a sheet of metal, a printing surface, and in geology one of the great slabs of the earth's crust — plate tectonics is named from that. Note on your plate, meaning what you have to deal with; and step up to the plate.
1nounplateA flat round dish for food.
“He cleared his plate and asked for a second helping.”
Patterna plate of + noun (food, pasta) · a dinner / side plate · clear your plate · on the plate
2noungreatA great slab of the earth's crust.
“Earthquakes happen where one plate of the earth's crust slides against another.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
plate is a flat dish or sheet.
pLATE → you are LATE, and the food on it is cold
You are late for dinner, and your food waits for you on a plate, cold, with a second plate on top.
hooks ontolate
Old French plate comes through Latin from Greek platys, broad or flat. Place, plaza and platypus come from the same flatness.
Old French
plate
Middle English
plate
English, today
plate
From Middle English plate, from Old French plate. From Middle English plate, from Old French plate, from Medieval Latin plata, from Vulgar Latin plattus, from Ancient Greek πλατύς (“broad, flat, wide”). Compare Spanish plato. foot Cockney rhyming slang, from "plates of meat" for "feet".
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA