Word.ws English Dictionary

sorte

sorte is the obsolete form of sort.

Meaning of sort

Noun

sort (plural sorts)

  1. A general type.
    • I stumbled along through the young pines and huckleberry bushes. Pretty soon I struck into a sort of path that, I cal'lated, might lead to the road I was hunting for. It twisted and turned, and, the first thing I knew, made a sudden bend around a bunch of bayberry scrub and opened out into a big...1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter I, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC
  2. (archaic) Manner, way; form of being or acting.
    • Soon as the term of those six years shall cease,
      Ye then shall hither back return again,
      The marriage to accomplish vow’d betwixt you twain.
      Which for my part, I covet to perform,
      In sort as through the world I did proclaim,
      That whoso kill’d that monster (most deform)
      And him in hardy battle...1590, Edmund Spenser, “(please specify the book)”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  3. (obsolete) Condition above the vulgar; rank.
    • “What think you, Captain Fluellen? is it fit this soldier keep his oath?”
      “He is a craven and a villain else, an’t please your majesty, in my conscience.”
      “It may be his enemy is a gentleman of great sort, quite from the answer of his degree.”
      “Though he be as good a gentleman as the devil is, as...c. 1599, William Shakespeare, Henry V
  4. (informal) A person evaluated in a certain way.
    • good sort, bad sort
  5. (obsolete) Group, company.
    • a sort of shepherds suing of the Chace1595, Edmund Spenser, The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser
  6. (Australia, UK, informal) A good-looking woman.

See all 23 meanings of sort

Forms of sorte

pluralsortes

Questions about sorte

What is sorte the obsolete form of?
Sorte is the obsolete form of sort.

Words near sorte in the dictionary

  1. sortation
  2. sortation system
  3. sortation systems
  4. sortations
  5. Sortavala
  6. sorte
  7. sorted
  8. sorted oneself out
  9. sorted out
  10. sorted the wheat from the chaff
  11. sorted through

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sorte (page history and authors); sort (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: “sorte.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sorte. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.