Spake

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Past tense of the verb speak, used in older or poetic English to mean that someone uttered words aloud
2. An archaic simple past form of speak, meaning that a person communicated something by voice
3. Old-fashioned past tense of speak, signifying that someone expressed thoughts or words in spoken form

Etymology: "Spake" is a past tense of "speak" that survived long after most English speakers stopped using it. It descends from Old English "spæc," the first and third person singular past tense of "specan," the Old English verb for speaking. Over the centuries the vowel shifted in the usual way for strong verbs of this type, and "spake" emerged in Middle English as a variant alongside "spoke." Here the older form lingered in the Bible and in liturgical and poetic language, which is why it still sounds solemn to modern ears. The "spake" in that line is the ancestor of this same root, and the word is not the only one in English to take a second life in old texts. Its origins are typically given as Old English, but the form's stronger association with the King James Bible, published in 1611, helped fix it in the public mind as the speech of scripture rather than of everyday talk.

Synonyms: spoke