entry
et
/ɛt/To eat, consume, use up, or worry
From English, from Old English et / eat (To consume food).
Word Ancestry
Short, blunt, and looking almost unfinished, “et” is best understood as a dialectal or colloquial cousin of “eat,” whose older English ancestor was Old English etan. Medieval English speakers commonly wrote eten, and over centuries the vowel and ending shifted until modern English settled on eat—while regional speech preserved shorter forms such as et. The same ancient eating family also has conspicuous relatives across Germanic languages: German essen and Dutch eten still carry the old shape in plain sight. The verb’s broader senses—using something up or causing someone to worry—grow from the hungry image of consumption: a fire eats wood, and anxiety eats at the mind. As for the alien sense, it comes from the 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and later internet jokes, not from the verb’s historical ancestry; one tiny syllable can therefore point either to dinner or to a finger-waving visitor trying to phone home.
The Story
Short, blunt, and looking almost unfinished, “et” is best understood as a dialectal or colloquial cousin of “eat,” whose older English ancestor was Old English etan. Medieval English speakers commonly wrote eten, and over centuries the vowel and ending shifted until modern English settled on eat—while regional speech preserved shorter forms such as et. The same ancient eating family also has conspicuous relatives across Germanic languages: German essen and Dutch eten still carry the old shape in plain sight. The verb’s broader senses—using something up or causing someone to worry—grow from the hungry image of consumption: a fire eats wood, and anxiety eats at the mind. As for the alien sense, it comes from the 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and later internet jokes, not from the verb’s historical ancestry; one tiny syllable can therefore point either to dinner or to a finger-waving visitor trying to phone home.
Modern Usage
A crude internet use referring to the fictional alien E.T., often in deliberately offensive parody
Popularized by: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Notable References
- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Kin & Kindred
From 'et / eat'·To consume food; use up; cause worry
Derived Terms
English words from this root
Sources
Free Dictionary
Urban Dictionary