comment

Etymology 1

From Middle English coment, comment, from Old French coment (“commentary”), from Late Latin commentum (“comment, interpretation”), from Classical Latin commentum (“invention, fabrication”).

noun

  1. A spoken or written remark.
    I have no comment on that.
    Pay attention to the teacher's comments in the margin of your marked essay.
    Santorum, in a comment regarding Senator John McCain's repudiation of torture, stated, "He doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they've broken they become cooperative" (Summers 2011). 30 November 2015, Shane O'Mara, Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation, Harvard University Press, page 12
  2. (uncountable) The act of commenting.
  3. (linguistics) The part of a sentence that provides new information regarding the current theme.
  4. (programming) A remark embedded in source code in such a way that it will be ignored by the compiler or interpreter, typically to help people to understand the code.

Etymology 2

From Middle English commenten, comenten, from Latin commentārī (“to consider thoroughly, think over, discuss, write upon”).

verb

  1. (transitive) To remark.
    I think Mamet always comments that commerce really comes down to just a confidence game 7/05/2003, Pierre Salinger, ABC News, “Analysis: Top film choices”, in NPR_Saturday
    As Cambridge historian Mervyn James commented, "silly quarrels escalated into battles in the streets." 2009 Winter, John M. Kang, “Manliness and the Constitution”, in Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, volume 32, number 1, page 261
  2. (intransitive, with "on" or "about") To make remarks or notes.
  3. (transitive, obsolete) To comment or remark on.
    […]who have expounded Scripture out of its Senses, and have so Commented the Laws thereof 1677, Lancelot Addison, A Modest Plea for the Clergy
  4. (transitive, software, of code) To insert comments into (source code).
    I wish I'd commented this complicated algorithm back when I remembered how it worked.
  5. (transitive, software, of code) To comment out (code); to disable by converting into a comment.

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