Compensated

How to spell compensated

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce compensated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does compensated mean?

1. verbGave someone money or another benefit to make up for a loss, injury, or effort.
2. verbCounterbalanced or offset one thing with another so that the effects cancelled out.

Compensated in a sentence

• The airline compensated every passenger for the cancelled flight.

• He compensated for his poor exam result with strong coursework grades.

• Her employer compensated her generously for the extra weekend shifts.

• The gentle slope compensated for the building's uneven foundations.

Where does compensated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb compensare, which meant 'to weigh one thing against another' and so 'to balance out' or 'offset'. It was built from com-, an intensifying prefix here meaning 'together', joined to pensare, a frequentative form of pendere, 'to weigh' or 'to pay'. The image is literally that of a balance scale, where losses on one side are matched by weights on the other, and that same pendere root surfaces in relatives such as 'pension', 'pendulum' and 'expense'. English took the verb 'compensate' in the early 1600s, partly through the older Latin sense of settling accounts, and 'compensated' is simply its past tense and participle. Remembering the 'pens' core (a thing weighed or paid) helps fix the spelling, since the middle vowel is an unstressed schwa that writers are tempted to drop or swap.

How the word is built

• com- (together, intensive)
• pens (to weigh, from Latin pendere)
• -ate (verb-forming)
• -ed (past tense/participle)