dote
Americanverb (used without object)
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to bestow or express excessive love or fondness habitually (usually followed by on orupon ).
They dote on their youngest daughter.
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to show a decline of mental faculties, especially associated with old age.
noun
verb
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to love to an excessive or foolish degree
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to be foolish or weak-minded, esp as a result of old age
Other Word Forms
- doter noun
Etymology
Origin of dote
1175–1225; Middle English doten “to behave foolishly, become feeble-minded”; cognate with Middle Dutch doten
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.
The writer lived and worked in her childhood home in Jackson, Miss.—tending to her camellias, doting on her nieces and quietly presiding for many years as the matriarch of Southern letters.
Luckily for Penelope, back on land Captain Strøm was the doting father to a houseful of tall, strong-limbed daughters, and it was not in his great Nordic heart to toss her overboard.
From Literature
Mostly, they dote on the kids, and cousins reconnect.
From Los Angeles Times
Victorian audiences were repelled by Henrik Ibsen’s fatally attractive newlywed who appears to have it all — the fancy house, the doting husband — only to be violently bored.
From Los Angeles Times
He was born in 1936 in Sacramento, Calif. His father was a well-respected local lawyer, and his doting mother had been an assistant in the state Senate.
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.
