Chosen

How to spell chosen

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce chosen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chosen mean?

1. verbPast participle of 'choose': selected as the preferred option from a number of possibilities.
2. adjectiveSpecially selected or favoured as the most suitable.

Chosen in a sentence

• verb

  The committee has chosen a new venue for the conference.

• adjective

  Only a chosen few were invited to the private viewing.

• verb

  She had chosen the blue fabric over the green one.

• adjective

  His chosen career took him across three continents.

Where does chosen come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of 'choose', which descends from the Old English verb 'ceosan', meaning 'to choose, taste, or try out'. That word belonged to a wider Germanic family, sharing an ancestor with the Old Norse 'kjosa' and the modern German 'kiesen', all carrying the idea of selecting after testing. The strong-verb pattern, where the vowel changes through 'choose, chose, chosen', is a native inheritance from Old English rather than something added by later Latin or French borrowing. The '-en' ending on the past participle is the same old strong-verb marker seen in 'taken', 'broken', and 'spoken'. The spelling trap is that the long 'oo' sound of 'choose' collapses to a short 'o' in 'chosen', so writers must drop one 'o' and remember the single 's' before the '-en'.

How the word is built

• choos/chos- (root of 'choose', to select)
• -en (past participle suffix)