Attended

How to spell attended

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce attended

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does attended mean?

1. verbWas present at an event, meeting, or place, especially one held at a set time.
2. verbDealt with, looked after, or gave one's care to a person, task, or need.

Attended in a sentence

• Only forty members attended the annual general meeting.

• Two nurses attended the patient through the night.

• She attended the conference in Berlin last spring.

• The manager promptly attended every customer complaint.

Where does attended come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of 'attend', which English borrowed in the 1200s from the Old French atendre, meaning 'to wait, expect, or pay heed to'. That French verb came directly from the Latin attendere, formed from ad, meaning 'to' or 'toward', and tendere, meaning 'to stretch'. The original image was of stretching one's mind toward something, in other words turning one's attention to it, and from that came the senses of waiting for, caring for, and being present at. The same tendere root stretches through a whole family of English words, including 'tension', 'extend', and 'tendency'. The spelling trap is the doubled 't': the Latin prefix ad- assimilated into at- before the t of tendere, so the modern word inherits two t's where the ear hears only one.

How the word is built

• at- (to, toward; from Latin ad-)
• tend (to stretch; from Latin tendere)
• -ed (past tense suffix)