Word.ws English Dictionary

etiolate

Syllables: eti·o·late/ˈiːti.əleɪt/

etiolate verb: to make pale through lack of light, especially of a plant.

Verb

etiolate (third-person singular simple present etiolates, present participle etiolating, simple past and past participle etiolated)

  1. To make pale through lack of light, especially of a plant.
  2. To make pale and sickly-looking.
    • She was a very lovely woman in her late thirties, in a silk dress of screaming scarlet that would have etiolated a white woman to bled veal.1980, Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
    • Gwynn and Richard were at the Westway Health and Fitness Centre, surrounded by thirty or forty etiolated drunks: playing snooker.1995, Martin Amis, The information
  3. (intransitive) To become pale or blanched.

Adjective

etiolate (comparative more etiolate, superlative most etiolate)

  1. etiolated

Forms of etiolate

Verb
third-person singular presentetiolates
present participleetiolating
past participleetiolated
pastetiolated
Adjective
comparativemore etiolate
superlativemost etiolate

Origin of etiolate

French étioler, from Norman French étieuler, ultimately from Old French estuble (“stubble”), from Latin stupla, from stipula (“straw, stubble”) (English stubble).

Words formed from etiolate

Questions about etiolate

What does etiolate mean?
Etiolate means to make pale through lack of light, especially of a plant.
What part of speech is etiolate?
Etiolate can be a verb or an adjective.
How do you pronounce etiolate?
Etiolate is pronounced /ˈiːti.əleɪt/.
What is the past tense of etiolate?
The past tense of etiolate is etiolated.

Words near etiolate in the dictionary

  1. etiochloroplast
  2. etiochloroplasts
  3. etiocholanolone
  4. etiogenetic
  5. etiognosis
  6. etiolate
  7. etiolated
  8. etiolates
  9. etiolating
  10. etiolation
  11. etiolations

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: etiolate (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-etiolate.wav.

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