Adopted

How to spell adopted

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce adopted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does adopted mean?

1. verbTook up, approved, or began to use something, such as a method, policy, or attitude.
2. adjectiveBrought legally and permanently into a family that is not the biological one.

Adopted in a sentence

• verb

  The board adopted the new safety policy after a long debate.

• adjective

  Their adopted daughter recently traced her birth records.

• verb

  The team adopted a more flexible working schedule last spring.

• adjective

  He spoke warmly about meeting his adopted brother for the first time.

Where does adopted come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb adoptare, which combined the prefix ad-, meaning 'to' or 'toward', with optare, meaning 'to choose' or 'to wish for'. In Roman usage adoptare literally meant 'to choose for oneself', and it was applied especially to the legal act of taking another person, often an heir, into one's own family. English borrowed the base verb 'adopt' through Old French adopter in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and 'adopted' is simply its regular past form with the suffix -ed attached. The same optare root also gives us 'option' and 'opt', a useful reminder that to adopt something is fundamentally to choose it. Because the root is opt and not 'opp', the word keeps a single p, which is the small spelling point worth fixing in memory.

How the word is built

• ad- (to)
• opt (from Latin optare: to choose)
• -ed (past-tense/participle suffix)