Bothered

How to spell bothered

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bothered

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bothered mean?

1. verbPast tense of bother: disturbed, annoyed or caused trouble to someone.
2. adjectiveFeeling worried, troubled or willing to make an effort about something.

Bothered in a sentence

• verb

  The constant noise from the building site bothered everyone in the office.

• adjective

  She looked bothered by the sudden change to the meeting schedule.

• verb

  Nothing about the delayed flight seemed to have bothered her at all.

• adjective

  He was too bothered about the looming deadline to enjoy his lunch.

Where does bothered come from?

Language of origin: Celtic

The base word 'bother' is something of a linguistic mystery. It surfaces in English only in the early 1700s, and almost all of its first recorded uses come from Irish-born writers such as Jonathan Swift, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Laurence Sterne, which strongly suggests an Anglo-Irish source. The favourite candidate is the Irish word 'bodhar', meaning 'deaf' or 'confused by noise', so that to be bothered was originally to be deafened, pestered or muddled by a din. From that physical sense of being worried at by sound it broadened into the modern meanings of annoying, troubling or taking the trouble to do something. The past-tense form 'bothered' simply adds the regular -ed ending, and because the root itself is not classical the spelling is refreshingly phonetic, with the only mild trap being the 'th' and the unstressed final syllable. Scholars still mark its ultimate origin as uncertain, so any tidy story should be treated with caution.

How the word is built

• bother (root verb of uncertain Anglo-Irish origin)
• -ed (past-tense / past-participle / adjective suffix)