Word Confusion: Gait versus Gate

Posted June 10, 2013 by Kathy Davie in Author Resources, Self-Editing, Word Confusions, Writing

Revised as of
5 July 2023

I can never figure out if I’m in some animated cartoon or what when I run across a character who has a limping gate. It’d be fun to see what Roald Dahl or R.L. Stine might do with that gate.

What I can’t imagine is someone opening and closing a gait . . .

Word Confusions . . .

. . . started as my way of dealing with a professional frustration with properly spelled words that were out of context in manuscripts I was editing as well as books I was reviewing. It evolved into a sharing of information with y’all. I’m hoping you’ll share with us words that have been a bête noire for you from either end.

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Gait Gate

Amsterdam Gait Classification GB is Orthokin‘s own work is under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons.


Front Garden Gate by Sound Media is in the public domain, via Public Domain Pictures.

Part of Grammar:
Noun 1; Verb 2, intransitive & transitive

Plural for the noun: gaits
Gerund: gaiting

Third person present verb: gaits
Past tense or past participle: gaited
Present participle: gaiting

Combined Form 1;
Noun 2, 3, 4; Suffix 1;
Verb 2, intransitive & transitive

Plural for the noun: gates
Gerund: gating

Third person present verb: gates
Past tense or past participle: gated
Present participle: gating

Noun:
Person’s manner of walking 1

Paces of an animal

Verb, intransitive:
Walk with a particular gait 2

Verb, transitive:
[Animals] Walking in a trained sequence of foot movements 2

Combined Form:
Combines with -gate (also see Suffix below) 1


Added to a name scandal resulting from concealed crime or other alleged improprieties in government or business

  • An exposed affair of corruption, venality, etc.

Indicating a person or thing that has been the cause of, or is associated with, a public scandal

Noun:
Hinged barrier used to close an opening in a wall, fence, or hedge 2

Number of people who pay to enter a sports facility, exhibition hall, etc., for any one event

Device resembling a gate in structure or function

An electric circuit with an output that depends on the combination of several inputs

[Skiing] Opening through which a skier must pass in a slalom course

[Slang] Dismissal

[Archaic] Way, path 3

[North England and Scotland] Habitual manner or way of acting

[Dialect] Method, style

[Dialect] The channels by which molten metal is poured into a mould 4

[Dialect] The metal that solidifies in such channels

Suffix:
[-gate] Attached to any word to indicate “scandal involving” 1

Verb, intransitive:
[Metallurgy] To make or use a gate 2

Verb, transitive:
[British, be gated] Confine a student to school or college 2

[Electronics] To control the operation of an electronic device by means of a gate

To select the parts of a wave signal that are within a certain range of amplitude or within certain time intervals.

Examples:
Noun:
His limp is affecting his usual gait.

He has the easy gait of an athlete.

He walks with a slow stiff gait.

Verb, intransitive:
While your dog must be aware of you, he should not look at you while he gaits.

He gaits unsteadily.

Have a friend watch your horse gaiting to watch his conformation.

Verb, transitive:
The dogs are gaiting in a circle.

Watch it! Those smaller crocodiles gait in bounds.

Prince gaits in a two-beat gait when he trots.

Combined Form:
A major political scandal in the early 1970s, Watergate, brought President Nixon down.

In 1976, Koreagate was a political scandal involving South Korean political figures seeking influence from 10 Democratic members of Congress.

Chinagate resulted in federal prosecutions of foreign influence peddlers who had been trying to buy a night at the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House.

Radical Rightists and the not-so-Reverend Jerry Falwell received illegal funds in Moongate.

Noun:
Just open the gate!

What’s the gate on today’s event?

She was so mad, she gave him the gate.

They’ve been lettin’ people go at the factory, and Pete was one of those who got the gate.

There are “various forms of electrolyte-containing dielectrics that are employed as a gate-insulating medium” (Park).

Suffix:
“Camillagate was a scandal which broke in the British tabloids in 1992, when a transcript of an explicit telephone conversation between Charles, Prince of Wales, and his mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, was published” (McMahon).

The New Orleans Saints bounty scandal, formally known as “Bountygate”, involved payouts for players on the New Orleans Saints team to injure opposing team players.

Reagan’s second term was gravely weakened by the Iran-Contra affair, sometimes known as Irangate.

Verb, intransitive:
It’s gating at 40 m/sec.

Moore’s Law can be extended by gating with multi-gate transistors.

Those new effects of a trench isolated transistor gate using side-wall gates.

Verb, transitive:
He was gated for the rest of term.

They’re gating the ion channel.

Gate those drum mikes and get rid of that ambient noise.

Derivatives:
Adjective: gateless, gatelike
Noun: gatecrasher, gated, gatehouse, gatekeeper, gatekeeping, gateman, gatepost, gateway
Verb, transitive: gatecrash
History of the Word:
  1. Its first known use was in 1509.

    Late Middle English gait, gate meaning gate, way

  2. Its first known use was around 1900.
  1. 1972, -gate was extracted from Watergate, nonce word, created as a result of a journalistic coinage to name major scandals.
  2. Its first known use was before the 12th century.

    Middle English from the Old English geat and akin to the Old Norse gat meaning opening.

  3. Its first known use was in the 13th century.

    Middle English, from the Old Norse gata meaning road and akin to the Old High German gazza meaning road

  4. It’s probably related to the Old English gyte meaning a pouring out, from geotan meaning to pour.

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C’mon, get it out of your system, bitch, whine, moan . . . which words are your pet peeves? Also, please note that I try to be as accurate as I can, but mistakes happen or I miss something. Email me if you find errors, so I can fix them . . . and we’ll all benefit!

Satisfy your curiosity about other Word Confusions on its homepage or more generally explore the index of self-editing posts. You may also want to explore Book Layout & Formatting Ideas, Formatting Tips, Grammar Explanations, Linguistics, Publishing Tips, the Properly Punctuated, Writing Ideas and Resources, and Working Your Website.

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Resources for Gait versus Gate

Apple Dictionary.com

Collins Dictionary: Irangate

Dictionary.com: gate

McMahon, Mary. “What Was Camillagate?” Wise Geek. Cultural World.org. 23 Aug 2022. Web. 14 Sept 2022. <http://www.wisegeek.com/what-was-camillagate.htm>.

Merriam-Webster: gate

Park, Sungjun, SeYeong Lee, Chang-Hyun Kim, Ilseop Lee, Won-June Lee, Sohee Kim, Byung-Geun Lee, Jae-Hyung Jang, and Myung-Han Yoon. “Sub-0.5 V Highly Stable Aqueous Salt Gated Metal Oxide Electronics.” Scientific Reports. Nature Briefing. 14 Aug 2015. Web. n.d. <http://www.nature.com/articles/srep13088>.

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Pinterest Photo Credits:

Horse Jumping by Eadweard Muybridge, Waugsberg, is in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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8 responses to “Word Confusion: Gait versus Gate

  1. Reblogged this on Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog and commented:
    For all those authors and writers who think wordcheck is sufficient for proofreadingand editing – site, instead of sight, please instead of pleas. etc 🙂

    • Oh dear, I am sorry to hear that you’ve encountered it so often. And thanks for the re-blog…it can only help make writers aware!

  2. One of my favorites I once encountered was “The horse was eating juicy chutes.” I also once used “horde” for “hoard.” It would have been difficult to get a bunch of barbarians into that little container! In fact, most of us know better, but we either aren’t thinking or the fingers simply betray us.

    • LOL, maybe the wood was just really fresh! I do know the finger-betrayal—my current one is typing form for from. I’m thinking it’s that right hand dominance…