Disrupted

How to spell disrupted

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce disrupted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does disrupted mean?

1. verbPast tense of disrupt: to have interrupted or thrown into disorder an activity, process, or system.
2. adjectiveThrown into disorder or interrupted; no longer running smoothly.

Disrupted in a sentence

• verb

  The strike disrupted rail services across the whole region.

• adjective

  The disrupted supply chain left many shelves empty for weeks.

• verb

  A power cut disrupted the meeting just before the final vote.

• adjective

  After the outage, the team faced a badly disrupted workflow.

Where does disrupted come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb disrumpere, meaning 'to break apart' or 'to burst asunder', formed from dis-, meaning 'apart', and rumpere, meaning 'to break'. The past participle of that verb was disruptus, which English adopted in the early 1600s, first chiefly as an adjective describing something shattered or broken up. The same rumpere root surfaces in a whole family of English words, including 'rupture', 'erupt', 'interrupt', and 'corrupt', all of which carry that core idea of breaking. Over time disrupt broadened from physical breaking to the modern sense of throwing an activity, system, or routine into disorder, and the modern business buzzword 'disruption' grew directly from it. The double consonant in 'rupt' and the single 's' after 'di' are the spots worth watching, since the dis- prefix never doubles its 's' here.

How the word is built

• dis- (apart)
• rupt (from rumpere: to break)
• -ed (past tense/participle)