Ate
noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 An elder sister Philippines
- 2 A respectful title or form of address for an older woman. Philippines
- 1 simple past of eat form-of, past
- 2 past participle of eat colloquial, form-of, nonstandard, participle, past
"I have a very good appetite, have ate some excellent melons, and they have served me up some quails, the fattest and tenderest I have ever ate."
- 1 Did extremely well; delivered strongly. slang, internet, 2020s
"He ate that verse."
Example
More examples"During summer breaks, I ate dinner at midnight."
Etymology
Probably a remodelling of earlier eat by analogy with other strong verbs such as break:†brake, give:gave, speak:†spake; compare the same process in rare Middle English at (“ate”) besides more usual et. However, the pronunciation /ɛt/ likely continues Middle English et, from Old English ǣt, from Proto-West Germanic *āt, from Proto-Germanic *ēt, with shortening as in e.g. thread.
Borrowed from Tagalog ate (“elder sister”), from Hokkien 阿姊 (á-ché, “eldest sister”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.