concatenate
Americanverb (used with object)
adjective
verb
adjective
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
concatenatesimple
-
concatenatessimple
-
have concatenatedperfect
-
has concatenatedperfect
-
am concatenatingprogressive
-
are concatenatingprogressive
-
is concatenatingprogressive
-
have been concatenatingperfect progressive
-
has been concatenatingperfect progressive
Past
-
concatenatedsimple
-
had concatenatedperfect
-
was concatenatingprogressive
-
were concatenatingprogressive
-
had been concatenatingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of concatenate
1425–75; late Middle English (past participle) < Late Latin concatēnātus (past participle of concatēnāre ), equivalent to con- con- + Latin catēn ( a ) chain + -ātus -ate 1
Explanation
Did you just link together several memories of your brother to form one longer story for his wedding toast? If so, you concatenated without knowing it! That’s because concatenate means to link things together to form a series or chain. In truth, the word concatenate is really a mouthful. It's hard to imagine anyone using it when they could use a synonym, such as link for the verb form and linked for the adjective form, just as well. But if you’re looking to impress with big words, try it out! To understand the situation in the Middle East, you have to concatenate the events of the past 50 years. You can tell others about that book you really love which is really a concatenate series of related poems.
Vocabulary lists containing concatenate
Candide
Looking to grow your vocabulary? Check out this interactive, curated word list from our team of English language specialists at Vocabulary.com – one of over 17,000 lists we've built to help learners worldwide!
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Interested in learning more words like this one? Our team at Vocabulary.com has got you covered! You can review flashcards, quiz yourself, practice spelling, and more – and it's all completely free to use!
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
In any collection worth our admiration, the end and shape of one story should cast its shadow over the next, and so on, until they all concatenate and form a greater shape by book's end.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 19, 2015
Dark Horse Green Word that typewriters, revolver shots and police sirens would concatenate in Carnegie Hall, last week drew a crowd unaccustomed to entering Manhattan's most formal music house.
From Time Magazine Archive
![]()
But why did he desire to concatenate this with the old Logic?
From Logic, Inductive and Deductive by Minto, William
It is far more often used to blast a file to standard output than to concatenate two files.
From The Jargon File, Version 4.2.2, 20 Aug 2000 by Steele, Guy L.
Pseudospores either solitary or concatenate, produced on the tips of generally short threads, which are either naked or contained in a perithecium, rarely compacted into a gelatinous mass, at length producing minute spores = Coniomycetes.
From Fungi: Their Nature and Uses by Cooke, M. C. (Mordecai Cubitt)
But for most of the last half of the 20th century, both were concatenated by baseball.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 22, 2021
In some way, it felt like my daughter’s existence—before she was even a proverbial gleam in my eye—was somehow ignited, in a concatenated series of events, during the gestation of this Brood X generation.
From Scientific American ● Jun. 14, 2021
Stewart, by contrast, grew up in the cunningly concatenated small town of Indiana, Pa., where his father owned the hardware store.
From Washington Post ● Nov. 17, 2017
The cleaned non-zero length alignments were then concatenated.
From Nature ● Jan. 24, 2017
One is a flat branching structure, in which a series of mostly uncomplicated clauses are concatenated side by side with and or with commas.
From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker
![]()
Synteny between the sub-genomes and B. vulgaris was assessed by first creating pseudomolecules by concatenating scaffolds which were known to be ordered and oriented within each of the nine chromosomes.
From Nature ● Feb. 7, 2017
Pseudomolecules were assembled by concatenating scaffolds based on their order and orientation as determined from the integrated linkage map.
From Nature ● Feb. 7, 2017
But what an amazing legacy of paranoia he’s left us, what a vast spectrum of theories that seems to keep growing, concatenating.
From Slate ● Apr. 10, 2013
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.