prate
/pɹeɪt/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.52 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "Thou ſowre and firme-ſet Earth / Heare not my ſteps, which they may walke, for feare / Thy very ſtones prate of my where-about, / And take the preſent horror from the time, / Which now ſutes with it."
- "What nonsense would the fool, thy master, prate, / When thou, his knave, canst talk at such a rate!"
- "Urania speaks with darken’d brow: ‘Thou pratest here where thou art least; This faith has many a purer priest, And many an abler voice than thou: […]’"
- "They are not so chic, these kids. They don’t haunt press receptions or opening nights; they don’t pose as street punks in the style of Bruce Springsteen, or prate of rock & Rimbaud."
- "Puffed up with fake jocularity, Bill epitomizes the smiley, buck-passing, back-stabbing, passive-aggressive office dictator who fears and despises his underlings while prating nauseatingly about everybody being one big happy family."
Etymology
From Middle English praten; either inherited from Old English prætt or borrowed via Middle Dutch or Middle Low German praten (from Old Saxon *pratt), all from Proto-West Germanic *prattu, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *prattuz (“idle or boastful talk, deceit”), from Proto-Indo-European *bred- (“to wander, rove”). Related to Dutch praten (“to talk, chat”), Low German praten, dated German pfrassen, Danish prate, Swedish prata (“to talk, prate”), Faroese práta (“to talk, gossip”), Icelandic prata;; also cognate with Polish bredzić (“to rave, jabber”), Latvian bradāt (“to talk nonsense”).