Etymology – The Verb Meet

MEETING is the heart of networking. It is the starting point and it is one of the most important activities. Why meet? To meet someone means to meet in some way. You could meet someone at a barbecue, you could meet somebody at a club, you could meet somebody in an interactive game.

There are so many ways to meet that it is mind boggling to think of all the ways to meet people. The word meet has three parts – meet, come to see or meet. These words have various meanings in different languages depending on the context. In English, meet means to meet, come to see or hear and lastly meet means to meet face to face.

When we say meet, it means to meet at some point. An example of a meeting is when two lovers meet for the first time and realize that they have fallen in love with each other. This is called metonymy and is derived from metonymy, the oldest form of indirect speech in Greek. The root word of metonymy is “to speak slowly”. So if we translate the sentence as ‘To see you, I slowly meet you’ the meaning would be ‘I see you, I speak slowly to you and I hope that you see me as I see you’.

In English, the verb meet comes from the verb meet (present tense) and the object of the verb is ‘come’. So if you say ‘You are meeting me’, the sentence would be ‘You (the person being spoken to) are meeting me (or you are coming along with me). Another interesting example is ‘They met at the store’. In this sentence, we know that the subject of the verb is ‘they’ but the verb meet comes from a verb that means ‘to meet”.

In the English language, there are three exceptions to the rule ‘the verb comes before the noun’. The most common one is in the case of affirmative sentences like “The man loves his dog”. In this case, the verb “are” precedes the subject “dog” while the noun remains on the end, like in “The man loves his dog”. There is also the exception in the future tense, where the verb meet does precede the subject “in the future”.

The etymology of the verb meet points to a French origin, probably middle English. However, the source has not been proven. Many linguists feel that the etymology of the verb meet depends upon a parallel usage in Greek.