Word.ws English Dictionary

cates

cates noun: provisions; food; viands; especially, luxurious food; delicacies; dainties.

Noun

cates pl (plural only)

  1. (archaic, plural, plural-only) Provisions; food; viands; especially, luxurious food; delicacies; dainties.
    • I had rather live / With cheese and garlic in a windmill, far, / Than feed on cates and have him talk to me / In any summer house in Christendom.a. 1597, William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, act 3, scene 1, lines 155–158
    • Hath any rival glutton got the start, / And beat him in his own luxurious art; / Bought cates for which Apicius could not pay, / Or drest old dainties in a newer way?1764, Charles Churchill, The Times

Proper noun capitalized: Cates

Cates (plural Cateses)

  1. A surname.

Forms of cates

pluralCateses

Origin of cates

Compare acates, and see cater.

Questions about cates

What does cates mean?
Cates means provisions; food; viands; especially, luxurious food; delicacies; dainties.
What part of speech is cates?
Cates can be a noun or a proper noun.

Words near cates in the dictionary

  1. caterwaulers
  2. caterwauling
  3. caterwaulings
  4. caterwauls
  5. catery
  6. cates
  7. Catesby
  8. Catesby's lilies
  9. Catesby's lily
  10. Cateses
  11. cateslytin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cates (page history and authors); Cates (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “cates.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cates. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.