Dispersed

How to spell dispersed

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dispersed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dispersed mean?

1. verbScattered or spread out over a wide area, or caused people or things to move apart.
2. adjectiveDistributed or spread out across a wide area rather than concentrated in one place.

Dispersed in a sentence

• verb

  The crowd dispersed quickly once the rain began.

• adjective

  The company runs a widely dispersed network of regional offices.

• verb

  Police dispersed the protesters before the road reopened.

• adjective

  A thinly dispersed population makes rural delivery expensive.

Where does dispersed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb dispergere, meaning 'to scatter abroad' or 'to spread in every direction', which was built from dis- 'apart' and spargere 'to scatter or sprinkle'. The past participle of that Latin verb was dispersus, and it is from this scattered form that English took both 'disperse' and its inflected 'dispersed'. The word entered English in the late 1300s, originally in religious and military contexts about people being scattered or driven apart. The same spargere root sits quietly inside the words 'sparse' and 'aspersion', the latter literally meaning a 'sprinkling' of accusations. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle: writers hear the schwa and the 's' sound and sometimes wonder whether to double a letter or insert a 'c', but it stays as a clean single 's' from spargere, with the past-tense -ed simply tacked on.

How the word is built

• dis- (apart, in different directions)
• spers (from Latin spargere: to scatter)
• -ed (past-tense/past-participle suffix)