Dotate
verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 To endow. literary, rare
"[…] the opponents of the theory of "spontaneous generation" amusing themselves with declaring that the learned "preparator" at the Museum of the Garden of Plants (son of the inventor of that famous theory) is going off to "the Phœnician City" to favor the assembled savans With an account of his efforts, hitherto unsuccessful, to hatch three crocodile-eggs (two of them white and one red), presented to him last winter by a traveller returned from the East, with a view to "dotating" France with a new article of food—stewed crocodile being declared by the said traveller to be both palatable and nutritious in a high degree."
Example
More examples"[…] the opponents of the theory of "spontaneous generation" amusing themselves with declaring that the learned "preparator" at the Museum of the Garden of Plants (son of the inventor of that famous theory) is going off to "the Phœnician City" to favor the assembled savans With an account of his efforts, hitherto unsuccessful, to hatch three crocodile-eggs (two of them white and one red), presented to him last winter by a traveller returned from the East, with a view to "dotating" France with a new article of food—stewed crocodile being declared by the said traveller to be both palatable and nutritious in a high degree."
Etymology
First attested in c. 1540; borrowed from Latin dōtātus, perfect passive participle of Latin dōtō (“to endow, apportion”) (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)), from dōs (“dowry, gift”, oblique stem in dōt-) + -ō, from Proto-Italic *dōtis, from Proto-Indo-European *déh₃tis, from Proto-Indo-European *deh₃- (“to give”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.