Meanings
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1
adj
Calm, quiet, and unhurried.
They walked at a sedate pace through the park.
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2
verb
To give someone a drug to make them calm or sleepy.
The patient was sedated before the operation.
Thesaurus
Etymology
The adjective is derived from Late Middle English sedate (“not painful or sore”), and directly from its etymon Latin sēdātus (“calm, quiet, composed”), participial adjective from sēdō (“to allay, appease, calm, settle; to end, stop”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *sed- (“to sit”). Compare English -ate (suffix forming adjectives meaning ‘characterized by [the thing specified]’). The verb is partly derived from sēdāt-, a participial stem of sēdō (verb sense 2—“to make (someone or something) calm”; see above), and partly a back-formation from sedation (verb sense 1—“to give (a person) a se…
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