18 May 2020
To wait or speak or do something with bated breath is to do so while barely breathing, usually in anticipation or out of fear. It’s often misspelled baited breath, a reinterpretation of the phrase because the verb to bate is unfamiliar to us today. But it makes sense when you realize that to bate is a clipped, or more specifically an aphetic, form of the verb to abate. (Aphesis is the loss of a short, unaccented vowel.)
To bate is pretty much gone from present-day English, but the phrase bated breath hangs on, something of a linguistic fossil, because of who coined the phrase. Its first known appearance is in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which was written sometime 1596–99, and which was first published in 1600. This is Shylock speaking in Act 1, Scene 3:
Shall I bend low, and in a bond-mans key
With bated breath, and whispring humblnes
Say this: Faire sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last,
You spurned me such a day another time,
You calld me dogge: and for these curtesies
Ile lend you thus much moneyes.
Shylock is saying that he is not going to hold his breath and give obeisance like a slave just because a man, nominally his social superior who had debased and insulted him in the past, is about to ask Shylock to lend him money. I often caution against assuming that a first citation, particularly by a famous writer, is actually the first use of a word. Most of the time, the writer is using a term that is familiar to them. But in this case, the assumption that Shakespeare actually coined bated breath is a reasonable one. Phrases, rather than words, in such cases are more likely to be original, and its alliteration and the fact that stylistically it slips seamlessly into the flow of the passage indicates that Shakespeare is waxing poetical here.
But while Shakespeare probably was the first to use bated breath, he was far from the first person to use the verb to bate. That goes back several more centuries.
The verb to abate comes to use from the Norman French abater, which in turn is from the Latin battere, meaning to strike, to pound. The same root is found in the English verb to batter. Both abate and the aphetic bate appear in the record around 1300. Here is the verb to abate appearing in the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, written c.1300
So þat constantin adde · sone poer ynou
& toward þis luþer men · norþward sone drou
Hii cudde þat hii were men · & slowe to grounde
& þe prute of scottes · & of picars · abatede in an stounde(So that Constantine soon had enough power and due to this the fierce men were soon driven northward. They knew that they were men and were slow to defeat and the pride of Scots and of Picts abated in a short time.)
And there is this from the poem Debate Between Body and Soul that appears in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108, also c. 1300:
O poynt of ore pine to bate,
In þe world ne is no leche,
Al tegidere we gon o gate
Swilk is godes harde wreche.(One mark of our pain to bate,
In the world there is no physician,
All together we go to the gate
Such is God’s hard retribution.)
So, Shakespeare used an aphetic form of a verb that today is no longer in widespread use to create a stock phrase that everyone knows the meaning of but that is no longer apparent from looking at the individual words. And as a result, it is often misspelled in an attempt to make the parts form a coherent whole.
Sources:
Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. baten v.(1), abaten, -i(en v.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. bated, adj., bate, v.2.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2011, s.v. abate, v.1.
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice, first quarto, London: James Roberts, 1600. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection.