Classed

How to spell classed

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce classed

What does classed mean?

1. verbPlaced something or someone into a particular category or group.

Classed in a sentence

• The surveyor classed the building as a historic structure.

• The film was classed as suitable for all ages.

Where does classed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of the verb 'class', which comes from the Latin classis, a term that originally named one of the divisions into which the Roman census split the citizen body according to wealth. From that bureaucratic sense of a ranked group, the word came to mean any set of people or things sharing a common quality. English took it up in the early 1600s through French classe, first as a noun for a category or social order and soon afterwards as a verb meaning to assign something to a category. The doubling question never arises here because the base ends in a single consonant after a vowel cluster, so you simply add -ed; the trap is purely that the spoken ending sounds like a plain 't', which can tempt writers toward 'clast' or to drop the silent vowel.

How the word is built

• class (group, rank)
• -ed (past tense suffix)