Adjective: moderate
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more moderate |
| Superlative | most moderate |
Sample Sentences
-
moderate language
-
a moderate Calvinist
-
travelling at a moderate speed
-
A number of moderate members managed […] to obtain a majority in a thin house. [1731, Jonathan Swift, The Presbyterians Plea of Merit:]
-
a moderate winter
-
These are called the Islands of the Blest; rains fall there seldom, and in moderate showers, but for the most part they have gentle breezes, bringing along with them soft dews [1859, Arthur Hugh Clough, Life of Sertorius:]
Adjectives inflected like moderate
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
From Middle English moderat(e) (“moderate, temperate”), borrowed from Latin moderātus, perfect active participle of moderor (“to regulate, to restrain, to moderate”) (see -ate (adjective-forming suffix)), from moder-, modes-, a stem appearing also in modestus (“moderate, discreet, modest”), from modus (“a measure”); see mode and modest. Doublet of moderato. Displaced native Old English ġemetlīċ (“moderate”) and metegian (“to moderate”). Cognate with French modéré. See: Latin Adjectives '
moderātus', French Adjectives '
modéré'.