Word.ws English Dictionary

gladiate

gladiate adjective: sword-shaped.

Adjective

gladiate (comparative more gladiate, superlative most gladiate)

  1. Sword-shaped.
    • The leaves of the iris and gladiolus are gladiate.

Verb

gladiate (third-person singular simple present gladiates, present participle gladiating, simple past and past participle gladiated)

  1. To fight as a gladiator, to digladiate.
    • You could try and take us (oh, oh),
      but we're the gladiators (oh, oh)
      […]
      We gladiate, but I guess we're really fighting ourselves […]2013, Lorde, Glory and Gore: Pure Heroine

Forms of gladiate

Adjective
comparativemore gladiate
superlativemost gladiate
Verb
third-person singular presentgladiates
present participlegladiating
past participlegladiated
pastgladiated

Origin of gladiate

From Latin gladius (“sword”) + -ate (adjective-forming suffix).

Back-formation from gladiator with -ate (verb-forming suffix).

Questions about gladiate

What does gladiate mean?
Gladiate means sword-shaped.
What part of speech is gladiate?
Gladiate can be an adjective or a verb.

Words near gladiate in the dictionary

  1. gladhands
  2. gladhearted
  3. Gladhill
  4. Gladhills
  5. gladial
  6. gladiate
  7. gladiated
  8. gladiates
  9. gladiating
  10. gladiation
  11. gladiator

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gladiate (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-gladiate.wav.

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