Biased

How to spell biased

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce biased

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does biased mean?

1. adjectiveUnfairly favouring one person, group, or point of view over another.
2. verbPast tense of bias: to have influenced someone or something unfairly in favour of a particular outcome.

Biased in a sentence

• adjective

  The report was clearly biased toward the company that funded it.

• verb

  The leading wording of the poll biased the responses in one direction.

• adjective

  A good referee must not be biased against either team.

• verb

  Early praise from the manager biased the panel before they read the applications.

Where does biased come from?

Language of origin: French

The base word bias came into English in the sixteenth century from the French biais, meaning a slant or oblique line, which itself probably derived from a Latin or Provencal source describing something set at an angle. In the game of bowls, the bias was the weighted curve that made a ball roll on a slanting course rather than straight, and from that very physical idea grew the figurative sense of a leaning of the mind in one direction. The form biased is simply bias plus the suffix -ed, used to describe a person or judgement that has been tilted toward one side. A spelling trap lurks here because bias already ends in an s, so writers sometimes wonder whether to double it; standard modern usage keeps a single s, giving biased, though the older variant biassed can still be found in some British texts. Remembering that the word is just bias with a plain -ed attached helps fix the single-s spelling.

How the word is built

• bias (a slant or oblique angle)
• -ed (adjectival/past-participle suffix)

British and American spelling

Biased is the American spelling. British English spells it biassed.