Employed

How to spell employed

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce employed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does employed mean?

1. adjectiveHaving a paid job; working for an employer.
2. verbPast tense of employ: put a method, tool, or person to use.

Employed in a sentence

• adjective

  She is currently employed by a large insurance firm in the city.

• verb

  The architect employed a clever design to save space in the small flat.

• adjective

  The survey counted how many graduates were employed within a year.

• verb

  The factory employed hundreds of local workers during the busy season.

Where does employed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb implicare, which literally meant 'to enfold' or 'to entangle', built from in- meaning 'in' and plicare meaning 'to fold'. In late Latin the sense drifted toward 'to be involved in' an activity, and the word passed into Old French as employer, meaning to use someone or something for a purpose. English borrowed it in the 1400s, and over time 'employ' settled into its two familiar modern senses: to put a person to paid work, and to make use of a tool or method. The same plicare root quietly sits inside a whole family of relatives, including 'imply', 'implicate', 'deploy' and 'reply', all of which carry that old idea of folding. Remembering the 'em-' prefix and the single 'l' helps, since the spelling keeps the French em- rather than doubling anything.

How the word is built

• em- (in, into)
• ploy (from Latin plicare: to fold, involve)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)