Domesticated

How to spell domesticated

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce domesticated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does domesticated mean?

1. adjectiveOf an animal or plant, tamed or cultivated to live with and be useful to humans rather than living in the wild.
2. verbTamed an animal or cultivated a plant so that it could live alongside and serve people.

Domesticated in a sentence

• adjective

  The farm relies on domesticated cattle for both milk and meat.

• verb

  Early settlers domesticated horses to pull their carts and ploughs.

• adjective

  A domesticated dog behaves very differently from a wild wolf.

• verb

  Researchers believe people first domesticated chickens thousands of years ago.

Where does domesticated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin domus, meaning 'house' or 'home', which gave rise to the adjective domesticus, 'belonging to the household'. From that came the medieval Latin verb domesticare, 'to make at home' or 'to tame', and English adopted 'domesticate' in the early 1600s with the sense of bringing animals or plants under human control and care. The adjective 'domestic' had already arrived a little earlier through French. The same domus root quietly survives in a whole family of English words, including 'domicile', 'dome', and even 'dominate', all of which circle back to the idea of the home and the household master. Because the word stacks an -ate verb ending onto -ic and then adds -ed, the spelling stays fully regular; the only thing to watch is the unstressed middle vowel in 'dom-ES-ti-cated'.

How the word is built

• domest- (from Latin domus: house, home)
• -ic (relating to)
• -ate (verb-forming)
• -ed (past participle / adjective)