the.com/predicate
The part of a sentence that finally tells you what the subject did.
means In grammar, the part of a sentence that says something about the subject — usually the verb and everything that goes with it; more broadly, to predicate is to assert or base one thing upon another.
from From Latin praedicare, "to proclaim, declare publicly," built from prae- "before, in front" and dicare "to make known, proclaim" (a relative of dicere, "to say"). The original sense was almost theatrical — to announce something out loud to a crowd — and that public declaring carried into church Latin, where praedicare meant to preach. Logic and grammar later borrowed it for the calmer act of asserting something about a subject; the same root, fittingly, also gives us "preach."
- grammar core
- Everything in a sentence that isn't the subject
- logic twin
- In math, a function returning true or false
- verb minimum
- Always contains at least one verb
- root meaning
- From Latin for to proclaim or assert
- hidden ruler
- Predicate logic underpins databases and AI reasoning
subject-verb agreement — fundamental grammar rule where the predicate verb must match the subject in number and person
predicate logic — formal system developed by frege and others in the 1870s-1890s that extends propositional logic with quantifiers and variables