Disregarded

How to spell disregarded

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce disregarded

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does disregarded mean?

1. verbPaid no attention to something or treated it as unimportant.

Disregarded in a sentence

• The committee disregarded his proposal and moved on to other business.

• She disregarded the warning label and ran the machine at full speed.

Where does disregarded come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past-tense form of 'disregard', a verb that English assembled in the early 1600s by joining the prefix 'dis-', meaning 'not' or 'the opposite of', to the verb 'regard'. The base verb 'regard' came into Middle English from the Old French regarder, which literally meant 'to look at' or 'to watch over', built from the intensifying 'r-' and garder 'to guard or watch', a word ultimately of Germanic origin that is also the source of 'guard' and 'ward'. So at its heart 'regard' is about turning your gaze toward something and giving it attention, and adding 'dis-' simply reverses that into pointedly looking away or refusing to heed. The spelling trap lives in the seam: writers sometimes drop one 's' or wonder about doubling, but it is cleanly 'dis' plus 'regard' plus 'ed', with no letters added or lost at the join.

How the word is built

• dis- (not, opposite of)
• regard (to heed, pay attention to)
• -ed (past tense suffix)