Asserted

How to spell asserted

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce asserted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does asserted mean?

1. verbStated or declared something firmly and confidently as true.

Asserted in a sentence

• The witness asserted that she had never met the defendant.

• The report asserted a clear link between the two transactions.

Where does asserted come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of 'assert', which comes from the Latin verb asserere, meaning literally 'to join to oneself' or 'to claim'. It was built from the prefix ad-, meaning 'toward', and serere, meaning 'to join, bind, or connect'; the same serere root also gives us 'series' and 'insert'. In Roman law asserere had a striking original use: to lay a hand on someone in order to declare them free, hence the sense of formally claiming or vindicating a right. English took the word over in the early 1600s, with the meaning settling into 'to state firmly' or 'to maintain as true'. The double 's' that trips writers up comes straight from the Latin assembly of ad- plus serere, where the 'd' assimilated into the following 's'.

How the word is built

• as- (from ad-, toward)
• sert (from Latin serere, to join or bind)
• -ed (past tense suffix)