Repast comes from Old French repast ('meal'), from Late Latin repastus, from repascere ('to feed again'), from re- ('again') + pascere ('to feed, graze'). The historical chain includes Old French repast, Latin pascere, and Proto-Indo-European *peh₂-. Older glosses in the chain include "meal", "to feed again", "again", and "to feed, graze", which help explain the semantic range of the modern word. Morphologically, repast is best read as compound and borrowing, yielding an English noun shaped by both form history and later usage. In current English it functions as a noun, with the sense "a meal, especially a substantial or formal one". related forms include pasture, pastor, and repasture. The result is an English noun whose etymology preserves the older forms while supporting the word's specialized modern meaning.