designate

Designate was borrowed from Latin dēsignātus, the perfect passive participle of designō. It's built with -ate, the same suffix family that shapes English adjectives and verbs from Latin participles.

The word entered English already carrying the sense of something marked or pointed out, since it comes from a participle meaning "marked out." No further shift is recorded in these facts.

Designate is a doublet of design — the two words descend from the same Latin root but took different paths into English.