Dated

How to spell dated

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dated mean?

1. adjectiveNo longer fashionable or current; belonging to an earlier style or time.
2. verbPast tense of 'date': to have marked something with a calendar time, or to have assigned a time of origin to it.

Dated in a sentence

• adjective

  The office software looked badly dated compared with the new system.

• verb

  The clerk dated every invoice before filing it away.

• adjective

  Her wardrobe felt dated after years of buying nothing new.

• verb

  Experts dated the manuscript to the early fifteenth century.

Where does dated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows out of the noun and verb 'date', which trace back to the Latin phrase data Romae, meaning 'given at Rome', the formula clerks wrote at the head of letters to record where and when a document was issued. The key word there was data, the feminine past participle of dare, 'to give', so a 'date' was originally the point in time at which something was given or written. English took 'date' from Old French in the 1300s, and the verb sense of marking something with a time soon followed. Adding the familiar suffix -ed produced 'dated', which literally means 'stamped with a time'; from there it drifted to mean 'belonging to an earlier time' and so 'old-fashioned'. The spelling is straightforward, with the single 't' simply doubled in sound but not in writing because the silent 'e' of 'date' is dropped before -ed.

How the word is built

• date (from Latin data, 'given')
• -ed (past-participle / adjective suffix)