pate
noun
the crown or top of the head.
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patee.
pate
1 American
[peyt]
/ peɪt /
noun
-
pates
plural
-
the crown or top of the head.
-
the head.
-
the brain.
pâté
2
American
[pah-tey, pa‑, pah-tey, pa‑]
/ pɑˈteɪ, pæ‑, pɑˈteɪ, pæ‑ /
noun
-
pâtés
plural
-
French Cooking. a paste or spread made of puréed or finely chopped liver, meat, fish, game, etc., served as an hors d'oeuvre.
pâte
3
American
[paht]
/ pɑt /
noun
pâté
1
British
/ pɑte, ˈpæteɪ /
noun
-
a spread of very finely minced liver, poultry, etc, served usually as an hors d'oeuvre
-
a savoury pie of meat or fish
pate
2
British
/ peɪt /
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of pate1
First recorded in 1275–1325; Middle English, of uncertain origin
Origin of pâté2
From French, dating back to 1695–1705; see origin at paste, -ee
Origin of pâte3
First recorded in 1860–65; from French: literally, “dough, batter, paste”; see origin at paste
Compare meaning
How does pate compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:
Explanation
Your pate is the top of your head. But say the word with a French accent, and voila! Now it’s a savory spread made of ground meat and spices. Pâté (the food!) is sometimes served with bread or crackers. Although it’s like paste, some pates are considered a delicacy, like pâté de foie gras, the rich French dish made from goose liver, while other pates are made of different types of meat or even vegetarian ingredients. The pate you eat is usually spelled with its French accents — pâté — so you know to pronounce it with the emphasis on the final syllable, tay. A plain old pate is a jokey word for the top of the head that rhymes with fate.
Vocabulary lists containing pate
"The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet," Vocabulary from Act 4
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"The Tragedy of Hamlet," Vocabulary from Act 3
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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:
Pizza popped up as often as pate on plates, while one caterer from La Reunion has won social media adulation for his gifts of cari, a spicy dish popular on the Indian Ocean island.
From Barron's ● Jul. 31, 2026
Shekoh Confections – Master Chocolatier Shekoh Moossavi creates hand-painted bonbons, sea-salt caramels and pate de fruits inspired by Persian heritage and French technique.
From Salon ● Nov. 20, 2025
With his bald pate, dark-framed glasses and knowing demeanor, he has become one of the foremost chroniclers of the world’s media barons and Manhattan potentates.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 15, 2025
Garcia takes Mexican standards including tacos, carnitas and sopes and reinvents them with local produce as well as flavors from other cultures, such as pesto, pate sucrée and hazelnuts.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 3, 2024
“And we have olives, cheese, pate, tomatoes and ham. And naturally, wine. Vive l’Angleterre.”
From "Atonement" by Ian McEwan
Singer puts it this way: Lee often baked her favorite mushroom pâté and seed bread when they lived in Brooklyn.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 25, 2024
"He's super. Dynamic, young, full of ideas. Why not, for now?" said Veronique Bacchi, buying pâté with her husband.
From BBC ● Jan. 12, 2024
Flambée, a French restaurant in Bogotá popular with diplomats and businesspeople, was for weeks selling homemade Dijon for around $7 a jar, roughly twice the usual price, alongside its lavish offerings of escargot and pâté.
From New York Times ● Jun. 10, 2023
His pâté course consists of 52 ingredients but doesn’t taste like a hodgepodge of a mess.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 27, 2023
In the stone cellar we uncover blankets, crates of champagne, tins of French pâté, and a folder of glossy photographs of a woman called Gloria Swanson.
From "The Bletchley Riddle" by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin
Indulge yourself with handcrafted, artisanal, small-batch chocolates, including yuzu pâte de fruit, sesame crunch, honey ganache and cinnamon zephyr ganache flavors.
From Seattle Times ● Nov. 16, 2023
Tomato is a great source of umami, therefore the concentrated version of the fruit in the form of pâte de tomate makes your taste buds fanatically excited.
From Salon ● Jul. 12, 2021
His recipe requires a pâte à choux for the dumplings.
From New York Times ● Feb. 15, 2021
Begin with a smear of pâte di bottarga, fish roe whipped with anchovies and tuna, then sip broth fortified by pasta and potatoes.
From Washington Post ● Jan. 21, 2021
Cold pies are of two kinds: the one cooked in a terrine or dish without pastry; the other in what the English call a “raised paste,” and the French a pâte chaude.
From Choice Cookery by Catherine Owen
In France, where snails are eaten piping hot with oozing garlic butter or mixed into pates, importers had noticed Ukrainian snails making inroads into the market.
From Seattle Times ● Jun. 16, 2022
Wheeler dubbed the result the no-hair theorem to emphasize that two black holes of the same mass and spin are as indistinguishable as bald pates.
From Science Magazine ● Jan. 7, 2021
Miss Dormer says “Hunger Games” fans often approach her to discuss Cressida’s unique “undercut” hairstyle, a style many acolytes of the books and films have copied on their own pates.
From Washington Times ● Nov. 19, 2015
Indelibly enigmatic, she tickles their pates but evades their clutches.
From Slate ● Feb. 27, 2012
When called upon, I delivered an effortless list of things that I detest: blood sausage, intestinal pates, brain pudding, I’d learned these words the hard way.
From "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris
Vachon, who long taught a class on charcuterie — “we do pâtés, terrines,” he said — was particularly proud of the dry-aging refrigerators, where salami hung.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 5, 2025
The term traditionally referred to prepared meat products like sausages, ballotines and pâtés, which were preserved and then served.
From Salon ● Jul. 10, 2023
It’s a spirit that spilled over to their customers, who brought them canned pâtés from trips abroad and hand-knit mittens at Christmas.
From New York Times ● May 16, 2018
There are no labels on the jars of pâtés or the bottles of wine they open up.
From BBC ● Nov. 3, 2016
We tasted the cheese, the sausage, the pâtés, the pickles, and the savouries of all sorts that the engineer had brought with him, and the wine that had come in his absence from abroad.
From The Chorus Girl and Other Stories by Constance Garnett
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.
