Amended

How to spell amended

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce amended

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does amended mean?

1. verbAltered or corrected a document, law, or statement to improve it or fix an error.
2. adjectiveHaving been changed or corrected from an earlier version.

Amended in a sentence

• verb

  The committee amended the proposal before the final vote.

• adjective

  The amended contract now reflects the agreed payment terms.

• verb

  She amended her tax return after spotting the mistake.

• adjective

  Staff must follow the amended procedure from next month.

Where does amended come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past form of 'amend', which traces back to the Latin verb emendare, meaning 'to free from fault' or 'to correct'. That verb was built from ex-, meaning 'out of', and menda or mendum, meaning 'a fault, blemish, or defect', so the literal sense was to take the flaws out of something. The word travelled into English through Old French amender during the 1200s, where the initial sound softened from the Latin 'e-' to 'a-'. Early on it carried a strong moral flavour, as in mending one's behaviour or making amends, before settling into its common modern use of formally altering a document, law, or statement. The same menda root survives in 'mend' itself and in 'emend', the scholarly term for correcting a text. Because there is only a single 'm' and a single 'd' in the stem, the spelling is gentler than it looks, though writers sometimes wrongly double the 'm'.

How the word is built

• a- (from Latin ad-, to)
• mend (from menda, fault/defect)
• -ed (past tense suffix)