Dismissed

How to spell dismissed

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dismissed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dismissed mean?

1. verbPast tense of dismiss: ordered to leave, removed from a job, or treated as not worth considering.

Dismissed in a sentence

• The manager dismissed three workers after the audit revealed the missing funds.

• The judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence.

Where does dismissed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of 'dismiss', which traces back to the Latin verb dimittere, meaning 'to send away' or 'to let go', formed from dis- 'apart' and mittere 'to send'. Medieval Latin reshaped this into dismittere, and that form passed into English in the early 1400s with the sense of sending someone away or releasing them from service. The mittere root is enormously productive in English and explains the doubled 's' here: it surfaces in 'mission', 'missile', 'transmit', and 'permit', all of which carry the idea of sending. Because the past form simply adds '-ed' to a stem already ending in '-ss', writers must remember two letters s followed by the ending, which is the main spelling snag. The legal use, where a judge dismisses a case, and the workplace use, where an employee is dismissed, both grew naturally from that original idea of formally sending something or someone away.

How the word is built

• dis- (apart, away)
• miss (from Latin mittere, missus: to send)
• -ed (past tense/participle)