I`m trying to write a program to search for a word in a sentence but backwards !!

Take a scentence like this, I want to search for the word "ate" then extract the word monkey to the left of it.

"The monkey ate all the bananas"

For it to work in my program the way I want to I cant search between the words "The" & "ate" - hard to explain but i dont want it this way.

What the program needs to do is find the word "Ate" then work backwards untill it gets to the word "the" in the sentence.

as simply as possible, using either left,split,instr ect...

cheerz