What does cate mean?
A cate is a choice or delicate article of food — a delicacy, dainty, or treat set apart from ordinary fare. The word entered English in the Middle Ages from the vocabulary of buying and selling: it descends from forms connected with purchase (the same source that later produced the verb 'cater'), so a cate was literally a good thing one went out to buy for the table. In Shakespeare's era and earlier it was a familiar word for the fine items on a banquet board — sugared fruits, pastries, spiced wines — and it often appears in the plural as 'cates'. Today it survives almost entirely in historical writing, literary pastiche, and the pages of unabridged dictionaries, where readers meet it in phrases like 'costly cates.' Though obsolete in everyday speech, it remains useful to anyone reading older English literature closely, and its kinship with 'cater' makes it a neat illustration of how words drift from commerce to cuisine.
nounA choice article of food; a delicacy or dainty morsel. The word is now chiefly archaic or literary.
- A choice or delicate article of food; a delicacy or dainty.
- (Obsolete/religious shorthand) An abbreviation of catechism.
"The banquet table groaned under every imaginable cate — sugared figs, spiced pears, and honeyed cakes."
"Among the cates set before the guests were candied violets and marchpane."
"He treated every meal as an occasion, savouring each small cate with unhurried delight."
The plural 'cates' is actually more commonly attested than the singular in historical usage, typically describing an assortment of delicacies laid out at a feast.
"The Christmas board was laden with cates of every kind."
"Cate" gave us "cater" — before caterers existed, a cate was simply something delicious worth buying.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of cate
Cate comes from Middle English, where it arose as a shortened form of 'acate,' a word meaning a purchase or thing bought. This traces back through Anglo-Norman and Old French acater (to buy), from Vulgar Latin *accaptare, derived from capere (to take), making it cognate at root with English words such as 'acquire' and 'achieve.' The same commercial root yielded the verb 'cater' via an agent noun for a purveyor of victuals. Cate has been in decline since roughly the seventeenth century and is now considered archaic.
How cate is actually used
Archaic and largely confined to historical, literary, or deliberately old-fashioned prose. Plural 'cates' appears frequently in older texts describing banquets.
Easily confused with cate
Cater is the verb meaning to provide food or services for an event and derives from the same root, whereas cate itself is the noun denoting the food or delicacy.
Kate is a common female given name, while cate is an archaic noun for a choice food.