Corrugated

How to spell corrugated

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce corrugated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does corrugated mean?

1. adjectiveShaped into parallel ridges and grooves, as with iron sheeting or packing cardboard, to add strength.

Corrugated in a sentence

• The parcel arrived in a sturdy corrugated cardboard box.

• The old farm shed had a roof of corrugated iron.

Where does corrugated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin verb corrugare, meaning 'to wrinkle up' or 'to throw into folds', which was built from the intensive prefix com- and the noun ruga, literally a 'wrinkle' or 'crease' such as the lines on an aging face. Roman writers used it of skin puckering and brows furrowing, so the earliest sense was thoroughly physical. English took the verb 'corrugate' in the early 1600s for the act of folding or ridging a surface, and the past participle 'corrugated' soon followed as a descriptive adjective. The familiar industrial sense, ridged iron sheets and the wavy inner layer of cardboard, arrived with nineteenth-century manufacturing, when the alternating folds were prized for adding strength. A handy memory aid lives in the spelling itself: the double r echoes the doubled, repeating ridges the word describes, while the single g often catches people out.

How the word is built

• cor- (from com-, together/intensive)
• rug (from Latin ruga: wrinkle, fold)
• -ate (verb-forming)
• -ed (past participle/adjective)