Credited

How to spell credited

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce credited

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does credited mean?

1. verbAdded a sum of money to an account.
2. verbAcknowledged someone as the source or author of something.

Credited in a sentence

• The bank credited her account with the refund within two days.

• The article credited the discovery to a junior researcher.

• The supplier credited us for the items we returned.

• She was credited with reviving the failing department.

Where does credited come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb credere, which literally meant 'to believe' or 'to trust', and from it came the noun creditum, meaning 'a thing entrusted' or 'a loan'. The financial sense developed in medieval Italian commerce, where credito described the trust a merchant extended when allowing payment later, and English picked the word up in the 1500s, partly through French crédit. From the start the word carried both the money meaning (trusting someone to repay) and the social meaning (believing in someone's worth or honour), which is why we still speak of being 'credited' with both a payment and an achievement. The same Latin root survives in the everyday words 'credible', 'creed', and 'incredible', all of which turn on the idea of belief. The single 't' in 'credited' is the spelling trap: because the stress falls on the first syllable, the 't' is not doubled, unlike in words such as 'committed'.

How the word is built

• cred- (believe, trust)
• -it (from Latin creditum, a thing entrusted)
• -ed (past tense suffix)