Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • transitive verb To write; compose.
  • transitive verb To set down in writing.
  • transitive verb Obsolete To dictate.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To put into verbal form; compose; write.
  • To conceive the form of; arrange for utterance or writing: only in the place cited.
  • In the following passage, to invite: perhaps a misprint.
  • To compose; write.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • intransitive verb To compose; to write, as a poem.
  • transitive verb To compose; to write; to be author of; to dictate; to prompt.
  • transitive verb obsolete To invite or ask.
  • transitive verb obsolete To indict; to accuse; to censure.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb transitive To physically make letters and words on a writing surface; to inscribe
  • verb transitive To write, especially a literary or artistic work; to compose
  • noun mineralogy An extremely rare indium-iron sulfide mineral.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb produce a literary work

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English enditen, from Old French enditer, from Vulgar Latin *indictāre : Latin in-, toward; see in– + Latin dictāre, to compose, to say habitually, frequentative of dīcere, to say; see deik- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French and Anglo-Norman enditer, from Latin in- +‎ dictare (“to declare”).

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Examples

Comments

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  • "To all you ladies now at land,

    We men, at sea, indite."

    Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset (1638-1706), To All You Ladies Now at Land.

    September 20, 2009

  • indite. what an inventive word meaning to write. a new word to my vocabulary. when i was a child my favorite book to read was the dictionary. i found it an adventure in learning. the words that opened into other words which created and gave meaning to my life. they told an intellectual as well as an emotional story.

    April 19, 2011

  • Several examples are apparent misspellings of "indict." Maybe "indite" will one day be an accepted alternative, but for now, they are two different words.

    October 31, 2015

  • "after a long search she was obliged to indite her epistle of love minus the edelweiss effusion."

    "Lady Librarians," Pall Mall Gazette. quoted in Robert Crawford, "The Library in Poetry" in Alice Crawford, ed., The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015), p. 192

    October 31, 2015