Copied
verbMade an identical reproduction of something, or imitated it.
How to spell copied
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce copied
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does copied mean?
- verbMade an identical reproduction of something, or imitated it.
Copied in a sentence
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She copied the report and filed both versions.
-
He copied the recipe from his grandmother's notebook.
Where does copied come from?
Language of origin: Latin
This is the past tense of the verb 'copy', which English took from Old French 'copie' in the 1300s, itself drawn from the Latin 'copia', meaning 'abundance' or 'plenty'. The leap from 'plenty' to 'duplicate' happened in medieval Latin scriptoria, where the phrase 'copia' came to mean an abundant transcript or reproduction of a text, since making a copy effectively multiplied a document. By the time the word settled into English it carried the modern sense of reproducing something exactly. The same Latin root survives in 'copious', which still means 'plentiful', a useful reminder of the family connection. The spelling trap in 'copied' is the y-to-i swap before the -ed ending, a regular English rule that writers nonetheless second-guess.
How the word is built
- copy (from Latin copia: abundance, plenty)
- -ed (past tense suffix, with y changed to i)
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