Accepted

How to spell accepted

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce accepted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does accepted mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of accept: received or agreed to something offered.
2. adjectiveGenerally regarded as correct, normal, or approved.

Accepted in a sentence

• verb

  She accepted the job offer the same afternoon it arrived.

• adjective

  A dark suit is the accepted dress for formal interviews at the firm.

• verb

  The committee accepted his proposal without a single change.

• adjective

  That theory is now widely accepted among researchers in the field.

Where does accepted come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past form of 'accept', which English took from the Latin verb acceptare, a frequentative of accipere meaning 'to receive' or 'to take to oneself'. That verb was built from the prefix ad-, meaning 'to' or 'toward', and capere, meaning 'to take' or 'to seize', so the literal idea was 'to take something offered to you'. English borrowed it through Old French accepter in the late fourteenth century, and the past form gained the regular -ed ending in English itself. The same capere root hides inside a whole family of relatives such as 'capture', 'receive', 'except', and 'capable', all of them turning on the notion of taking. The spelling trap is the doubled c followed by the pt cluster: the first c is hard and the second soft, an echo of the ad- prefix assimilating to the c of capere.

How the word is built

• ac- (to, from ad-)
• cept (take/receive, from Latin capere)
• -ed (past tense/participle)