Disappointed

How to spell disappointed

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce disappointed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does disappointed mean?

1. adjectiveFeeling sad or dissatisfied because something hoped for did not happen or fell short of expectations.

Disappointed in a sentence

• She was deeply disappointed when the promotion went to someone else.

• The customers felt disappointed by the poor quality of the meal.

Where does disappointed come from?

Language of origin: French

This word grows out of the verb 'disappoint', which English assembled in the fifteenth century from the prefix 'dis-', carrying a sense of reversal or undoing, and 'appoint', borrowed from the Old French 'apointier', meaning 'to arrange' or 'to settle a matter'. That French verb in turn traces back to the phrase 'a point', literally 'to a point', the idea being to bring something neatly to a fixed point or agreement. So to 'disappoint' someone originally meant to undo an arrangement or remove them from an appointed office, and only later did it soften into the familiar emotional sense of failing to fulfil a hope or expectation. The adjective 'disappointed' is simply the past participle pressed into service to describe the resulting let-down feeling. The common spelling trap lies in the front of the word: there is a single 's' but a doubled 'p', the opposite of what many writers instinctively reach for, because the 'dis-' prefix sits in front of an 'appoint' that already begins with its own 'app-'.

How the word is built

• dis- (reversal/negation)
• appoint (from Old French apointier: to arrange, settle)
• -ed (past-participle/adjective suffix)