Present participle or gerund form meaning to eat or consume.
From Old English 'etan' or archaic 'ate,' with the '-ing' suffix added. This is an obsolete or highly dialectal form; modern English uses 'eating' instead.
English once had much more variation in how we formed verb participles, and 'ating' shows one of those older patterns—as English standardized, we settled on 'eating' as the clear, universal choice.
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