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invite

verbnouncommon in dialogue

  • //ɪnˈvaɪt//

To ask for the presence or participation of someone or something.

verb

  1. 1

    To ask for the presence or participation of someone or something.

    We invited our friends round for dinner.

    A Nimph is marryed to a Fay, Great preparations for the Day, All Rites of Nuptials they recite you, To the Brydall and inuite you.

  2. 2

    To request formally.

    I invite you all to be seated.

    I always invite criticism of my essays.

  3. 3

    To encourage.

    Wearing that skimpy dress, you are bound to invite attention.

    The refusal to maintain such a navy would invite trouble, and if trouble came would insure disaster.

    "Blindness invites confidence," replied Carrados. "We are out of the running—human rivalry ceases to exist. […]"

  4. 4

    To allure; to draw to; to tempt to come; to induce by pleasure or hope; to attract.

    to inveigle and invite th' unwary sense

    shady groves, that easy sleep invite

    There no delusive hope invites despair.

Etymology

From Middle French inviter, from Latin invītō. Displaced native English lathe

noun

  1. 1

    informalAn invitation.

    An open invite has been given to all UK workers to join in common cause with the union, as more than 40,000 RMT members at Network Rail and 13 train operating companies walked out on June 21 in the first of three 24-hour strikes over pay, conditions and job security.

Etymology

From the verb invite.

Forms

plural
invites
past tense
invited
past participle
invited
present participle
inviting
third person singular
invites
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).