age
Definitions
General English
Agriculture
- noun the number of years during which a person or thing has existed
- verb to treat flour to make the dough more elastic and whiter
Food
- Deep-fried tofu, cut into pouches, used to make inari by stuffing with sushi rice and flavourings prior to braising in a mixture of dashi, sugar, soya sauce and sake
Human Resources
- noun the number of years someone has lived
Slang
- suffix (written as -age)a termination that became popular amongst older adolescents in the early 1990s in creating mock-serious nouns from existing slang and standard bases. Buffage, grindage and tuneage are examples. The tendency was popularised by its use in such films as Bill and Ted’s bogus Journey, Wayne’s World and California Man.
Travel
- verb to store food or a wine for a period of time to enable it to develop a desired flavour or become more tender
Origin & History of “age”
Age has undergone considerable transmutations and abbreviations since its beginnings in Latin. Its immediate source in English is Old French aage, which was the product of a hypothetical vulgar Latin form *aetāticum (the t is preserved in Provençal atge). this was based on Latin aetāt- (stem of aetās), which was a shortening of aevitās, which in turn came from aevum ‘lifetime’. This entered English in more recognizable form in medieval, primeval, etc; it is related to Greek aiṓn ‘age’, from which English gets aeon (17th c.), and it can be traced back to the same root that produced (via Old Norse eí) the now archaic adverb ay(e) ‘ever’ (as in ‘will aye endure’).
