Cultured

How to spell cultured

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cultured

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cultured mean?

1. adjectiveShowing refined taste, education, and an appreciation of the arts and intellectual pursuits.
2. adjectiveGrown or produced under controlled laboratory conditions, as with cells, bacteria, or pearls.

Cultured in a sentence

• Her cultured manner and wide reading impressed everyone at the dinner.

• The lab examined the cultured bacteria under a microscope.

• He was a cultured man who collected paintings and attended the opera.

• A cultured pearl forms after a bead is inserted into the oyster.

Where does cultured come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows from the Latin verb colere, which literally meant to till, tend, or cultivate the soil, and which also broadened to mean to honour or to look after. From its past participle came cultura, the act of tending or growing, which passed through French and gave English the noun 'culture' in the 1400s, first in the very literal farming sense of preparing land and raising crops. Over the following centuries the idea of cultivation was applied figuratively to the mind, so that a person whose tastes and learning had been carefully developed could be described as 'cultured', a usage that took hold in the 1700s. Quite separately, science revived the original growing sense: from the late 1800s laboratories 'cultured' bacteria and tissues, and jewellers later 'cultured' pearls by seeding oysters. The spelling keeps the full cult-ure stem before the -ed ending, which is worth remembering since the 't' and 'u' are easy to slur in speech; the same Latin root sits inside agriculture, cultivate, and even colony.

How the word is built

• cult- (from Latin colere: to till, tend, cultivate)
• -ure (noun suffix)
• -ed (adjective/past-participle suffix)