Anticipated

How to spell anticipated

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce anticipated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does anticipated mean?

1. verbExpected or predicted that something would happen, and often prepared for it in advance.
2. adjectiveExpected or awaited; predicted to occur.

Anticipated in a sentence

• verb

  The sales team anticipated a busy weekend and ordered extra stock.

• adjective

  The long anticipated software update finally arrived on Monday.

• verb

  Nobody anticipated how quickly the storm would move inland.

• adjective

  Profits matched the anticipated figures in the annual report.

Where does anticipated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb anticipare, which meant 'to take before' or 'to take care of in advance'. It was built from ante, meaning 'before', joined to capere, meaning 'to take' or 'to grasp', so the literal idea was grasping something ahead of time. Latin already used it for acting in advance of an event, and English adopted it in the sixteenth century, at first in the sense of seizing or doing something prematurely before broadening into the modern meaning of expecting or looking forward to a future event. A useful spelling note hides in the beginning: the opening 'anti' here is not the familiar Greek anti meaning 'against', but the Latin ante meaning 'before', which is why writers should think of 'taking beforehand'. The same capere root that gives the central -cip- also turns up in relatives such as 'capture', 'receive', and 'participate'. The past-tense form simply adds the regular -ed ending, and the trap is the soft, almost swallowed middle vowel in -tici-, easy to drop when writing quickly.

How the word is built

• anti- (here from Latin ante- 'before')
• cip (from capere 'to take')
• -ate (verb suffix)
• -ed (past tense/participle)