Banished

How to spell banished

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce banished

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does banished mean?

1. verbSent away or driven out from a place, group, or one's mind, in the past tense.

Banished in a sentence

• The medieval king banished the disloyal nobleman from the realm.

• She banished every doubt before walking into the interview.

Where does banished come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past tense of 'banish', which English took from Old French in the 1300s. The Old French verb was 'banir', whose stem 'baniss-' gave the English '-ish' ending seen in many borrowed verbs such as 'finish' and 'punish'. The root behind it is the Frankish (Germanic) word '*bannjan', meaning 'to proclaim or order under threat of penalty', and the very same family produced the everyday English noun 'ban'. The literal early sense was a formal public proclamation that drove someone out of a community, and over time it settled into the modern meaning of forcing a person to leave a place. Because the verb keeps a single 'n' and a single 's', writers are sometimes tempted to double a letter that does not belong, even though the spelling simply follows the plain 'ban' plus the '-ish' suffix.

How the word is built

• ban (proclaim, forbid)
• -ish (verb-forming suffix)
• -ed (past tense)