Advocated

How to spell advocated

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce advocated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does advocated mean?

1. verbPublicly supported or recommended a particular cause, policy, or course of action.

Advocated in a sentence

• The committee advocated a complete overhaul of the pension scheme.

• She advocated flexible working hours long before they became common.

Where does advocated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past-tense form of the verb 'advocate', which traces back to the Latin advocatus, meaning 'one called to aid', especially a legal helper summoned to support a person in court. That noun was built from advocare, a compound of ad, meaning 'to' or 'toward', and vocare, meaning 'to call', so the literal sense was 'to call someone to your side'. English took the word through Old French and Anglo-Norman in the medieval period, at first chiefly as a noun for a legal pleader, a sense still alive in Scottish courts where lawyers are called advocates. The verb meaning 'to plead for, recommend, or publicly support a cause' grew up later, around the seventeenth century. The same vocare root echoes in 'vocal', 'vocation', and 'convocation', and remembering that buried 'voc' (a calling) helps fix the spelling, since the trap is hearing the unstressed middle vowel as anything other than the 'o' in voc.

How the word is built

• ad- (toward)
• voc (call, from Latin vocare)
• -ate (verb suffix)
• -ed (past tense)