Eat

Part of speech: verb

Pronunciation: /iːt/

Definitions

1. to consume food by taking it into the mouth, chewing, and swallowing it
2. to consume organic matter for sustenance by bringing it into the mouth, which entails biting, chewing, and swallowing for digestion
3. to take in food through the mouth, processing it by chewing and swallowing to nourish the body

Etymology: The verb "eat" is one of English's oldest words, passed down unbroken from the earliest Germanic speech. Its ancestor was Old English "etan," which belongs to a family of cognates across the Germanic languages: German "essen," Dutch "eten," Swedish "äta," and the Gothic "itan," the oldest of these to be written down. The same root reaches back to a Proto-Indo-European "h₁ed-," which is also the source of Latin "edere," "to eat," the ancestor of words like "edible" and "comestible" in English. Yet English took its everyday word for eating from the Germanic side, not from Latin. The noun is an older-looking sibling of the verb. Old English "ǣt" meant "food" or "eating," and it survives in modern German as "Aas," meaning carrion, and in Icelandic as "át," meaning solid food. English lost that noun over time, so the verb is what remains, and the word has stayed nearly unchanged in sense for more than a thousand years.

Synonyms: consume, devour, ingest, munch, chew

Antonyms: fast, abstain, starve, diet