sate

SAYT/seɪt/

4 meanings of sate

1
verbtransitive
To satisfy an appetite or desire, or the person who feels it, so fully that they are filled up.
No amount of praise seemed to sate her appetite for attention.
A huge buffet sated even the hungriest hikers after the climb.
Similarsatiate
Note
The verb comes from an older sade, which meant "to weary" as well as "to satisfy", and took its present spelling under the pull of satiate and satisfy. The weariness has never quite left: Macaulay's wanderers are "sated with the business and pleasure of great cities", and in Rider Haggard's She the learned reader risks being sated "with too many antiquities". What fills comes after with.
2
noununcountable
Satay, a dish of small pieces of seasoned meat grilled on skewers.
The stall grilled sate over glowing coals and sold it ten skewers at a time.
Her cookbook includes a recipe for beef sate marinated in lemongrass and garlic.
Similarsatay
Note
The spelling is Malay sate, taken over unchanged, and satay is the same word in the form English more usually gives it. Both name the same skewered, grilled dish, so a recipe or a menu may use either without any change of meaning.
3
verbdated
Past tense of sit. An old, poetic form; today the form is sat.
So saying, she sate down at a little distance upon the bench on which Allan M‘Aulay was placed, and tuning her clairshach, a small harp, about thirty inches in height, she accompanied it with her voice.
1819, Jedediah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], Tales of My Landlord
Note
This is the old past tense that sat replaced, straight from Old English sæt, the past of sittan, and it has no relation to the verb of satisfying. Walter Scott could still write "she sate down", and Housman, in A Shropshire Lad, "Sate the king when healths went round". Today it belongs to verse and to deliberately old-fashioned prose; in ordinary writing the form is sat.

Less common meaning

4
verbdated
Past participle of sit. An old, poetic form; today the form is sat.
Note
Paired with had, the old form makes the past perfect: the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, returning at eight in the morning, "had sate up the live-long night". Present-day English has sat in both slots, so had sate is a form to recognize in older books, not one to write.

Practice

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Origins

Meaning 1

An alteration, influenced by words such as satiate and satisfy, of earlier sade (“to weary, satiate, satisfy”), from Middle English saden and Old English sadian (“to satisfy, fill”). It goes back through Proto-Germanic *sadaz (“sated”) to Proto-Indo-European *seh₂- (“to satiate”), and is related to Middle High German saten, Icelandic seðja and English sad.

Meanings 3–4

From Middle English sate, satte, from Old English sæt, the first and third person singular past tense of sittan (“to sit”).

Meaning 2

From Malay sate (“satay”).