kaldte

Kaldte is the Danish past tense form of the verb kalde, which means to call or to name. It is used to describe naming someone or something, or addressing a person by a term or name. The past tense kaldte is common in everyday Danish, in narrative prose, and in reported speech.

In Danish, the verb kalde has several related uses. It can express calling someone by a name, labeling something with a term, or referring to a nickname. It can also introduce phrases such as kaldt for, indicating something was called by a particular name or title. Typical sentence structures include kaldte plus a direct object (De kaldte ham en helt — They called him a hero) or kaldte it plus a name or label (De kaldte koncerten en triumf). The verb forms are kalder (present), kaldte (past), har kaldt (present perfect), and kald. (imperative in some contexts).

Etymologically, kaldte stems from the Danish verb kalde, related to cognates in other Scandinavian languages. In Norwegian Bokmål and Swedish, the equivalents are often spelled differently in the past tense (kalte in Norwegian, kallade in Swedish), reflecting regional orthographic and phonetic developments. In Danish, kaldte is also found in the fixed expression kaldte sig, meaning “called oneself,” used to indicate self-designation or an assumed title.

Usage notes: kaldte appears in narrative history, reported speech, and everyday conversation. It is important to distinguish the Danish past tense kaldte from the Norwegian kalte and Swedish kallade, which illustrate how similar roots diverge across Scandinavian languages.