concatenate
Americanverb (used with object)
-
concatenates,
present (3rd person singular)
-
concatenated,
past participle, past
-
concatenating
present participle
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
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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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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
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The cause of truth is not served by unwarranted assertions; and the facts are often so difficult to concatenate that dogmatism becomes an impertinence.
From Introduction to the Old Testament by John Edgar McFadyen
To be sure that brain of his is awry, and has gaps in it, but one can discern here and there thoughts consecutive and concatenate.
From Napoleon the Little by Victor Hugo
Spinous-radiate: beset with spines in a circle, either concatenate, united at their bases, or setaceous, like bristles.
From Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology by John. B. Smith
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
Third, the concatenated segments were aligned using GeneWise47 to refine the gene models.
From Nature ● Dec. 13, 2016
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
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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.