Gate
name, noun, verb, slang ·Very common ·Middle school level
Definitions
- 1 A doorlike structure outside a house.
- 2 A way, path. Northern-England, Scotland
"I was going to be an honest man; but the devil has this very day flung first a lawyer, and then a woman, in my gate."
- 3 gifted and talented education abbreviation, acronym, uncountable
- 4 a movable barrier in a fence or wall wordnet
- 5 A doorway, opening, or passage in a fence or wall.
"At 7, he made his exit through the Ch‘ien-ch‘ing and the Lung-tsung gates, and thence, through the Yung-Hang Gate he entered the Tz‘u-ning Palace."
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- 6 A journey. obsolete
"[…] nought regarding, they kept on their gate, / And all her vaine allurements did forsake […]"
- 7 a computer circuit with several inputs but only one output that can be activated by particular combinations of inputs wordnet
- 8 A movable barrier.
"The gate in front of the railroad crossing went up after the train had passed."
- 9 A street; now used especially as a combining form to make the name of a street e.g. "Briggate" (a common street name in the north of England meaning "Bridge Street") or Kirkgate meaning "Church Street". Northern-England, Scotland
- 10 passageway (as in an air terminal) where passengers can embark or disembark wordnet
- 11 A passageway (as in an air terminal) where passengers can embark or disembark.
- 12 Manner; gait. British, Scotland, archaic, dialectal
- 13 total admission receipts at a sports event wordnet
- 14 A location which serves as a conduit for transport, migration, or trade.
"Lyons and Fisher's stations, who have spared nothing to ensure a success on this point, there is every reason to believe that the Northern Territory will soon be able to make a proper use of her geographical position, and become the gate of the East for all the Australian colonies."
- 15 The amount of money made by selling tickets to a concert or a sports event.
- 16 A logical pathway made up of switches which turn on or off. Examples are and, or, nand, etc.
- 17 The controlling terminal of a field effect transistor (FET).
- 18 In a lock tumbler, the opening for the stump of the bolt to pass through or into.
- 19 The channel or opening through which metal is poured into the mould; the ingate; tedge.
- 20 The waste piece of metal cast in the opening; a sprue or sullage piece. Also written geat and git.
- 21 The gap between a batsman's bat and pad.
"Singh was bowled through the gate, a very disappointing way for a world-class batsman to get out."
- 22 A mechanism, in a film camera and projector, that holds each frame momentarily stationary behind the aperture.
"After all, not using film has advantages other than cost: the curse of getting a hair in the gate (the rectangular opening at the front of a camera) is gone; the problem of getting dirt on the film swept away."
- 23 A line that separates particle type-clusters on two-dimensional dot plots.
- 24 A tally mark consisting of four vertical bars crossed by a diagonal, representing a count of five.
- 25 An individual theme park as part of a larger resort complex with multiple parks.
"It would encompass more than 500 acres and include a new theme park, several hotels, two mammoth parking garages with direct access from the freeway and a "third gate" — land set aside for future expansion."
- 26 A place where drugs are illegally sold. slang
"The gangs were fighting for control of "drug gates," control points for the sale of crack cocaine, heroin and marijuana."
- 27 A man; a male person. dated
"Whatcha gonna say there, gate?"
- 28 A tunnel serving the coal face.
- 1 To keep something inside by means of a closed gate. transitive
- 2 restrict (school boys') movement to the dormitory or campus as a means of punishment wordnet
- 3 To punish (a student) by not allowing to leave the college grounds. dated, historical, transitive
"You climbed the wall, for which you ought to be gated; and finally, you came in blotto, for which you ought to be sent down."
- 4 control with a valve or other device that functions like a gate wordnet
- 5 To open (a closed ion channel). transitive
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- 6 supply with a gate wordnet
- 7 To furnish with a gate. transitive
- 8 To turn (an image intensifier) on and off selectively, as needed or to avoid damage from excessive light exposure. See autogating. transitive
- 9 To selectively regulate or restrict (access to something). transitive
"Lillian walked the halls wearing a shirt plastered with what she assured everyone was a memetic stun agent; it looked just like the kill agent gating access to the SCP-001 database file, but as she patiently explained to McInnis, in art, context is everything."
- 1 A ghost town in Scott County, Arkansas, United States.
- 2 A tiny town in Beaver County, Oklahoma, United States.
- 3 An unincorporated community in Thurston County, Washington, United States.
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"The Golden Gate Bridge is made of iron."
Etymology
From Middle English gate, gat, ȝate, ȝeat, from Old English ġeat (“gate”), from Proto-West Germanic *gat, from Proto-Germanic *gatą (“hole, opening”). See also Old Norse gat, Swedish and Dutch gat, Low German Gaat, Gööt.
Borrowed from Old Norse gata, from Proto-Germanic *gatwǭ. Cognate with Danish gade, Swedish gata, German Gasse (“lane”). Doublet of gait.
Related phrases
More for "gate"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.