Accrued

How to spell accrued

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce accrued

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does accrued mean?

1. verbBuilt up or accumulated gradually over time, especially money, interest, or entitlements.
2. adjectiveDescribing an amount that has accumulated but has not yet been paid or received.

Accrued in a sentence

• verb

  Interest accrued steadily on the savings account throughout the year.

• adjective

  The accrued interest was added to the outstanding loan balance.

• verb

  By the time she retired, she had accrued six weeks of unused leave.

• adjective

  The company reported its accrued liabilities in the quarterly accounts.

Where does accrued come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb accrescere, which meant 'to grow on to' or 'to increase', built from the prefix ad- meaning 'to' or 'towards' and the verb crescere meaning 'to grow'. That same crescere root sits inside familiar words such as 'increase', 'crescent', and 'crescendo', all of which carry the idea of growing or swelling. The Latin form passed into Old French as acreue, the past participle of the verb acroistre, and English picked it up in the fifteenth century, especially in legal and financial language where rights, debts, and interest were said to grow over time. The modern spelling keeps the doubled c from the assimilated ad- prefix and the silent finish of -ue before the -d, which is exactly the trap: writers tend to drop one c or forget the e. Knowing it literally means 'grown towards' helps fix both the double c and the hidden e in memory.

How the word is built

• ac- (from ad-: to, towards)
• crue (from Latin crescere: to grow)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)