Excluded

How to spell excluded

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce excluded

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does excluded mean?

1. verbKept a person, group, or thing out, or left it out of a total or consideration.
2. adjectiveShut out or left out of a group, activity, or arrangement.

Excluded in a sentence

• verb

  The damaged goods were excluded from the final refund.

• adjective

  She felt excluded when her colleagues planned the lunch without her.

• verb

  Two members were excluded from the committee after the dispute.

• adjective

  The new hire seemed excluded during the team meetings.

Where does excluded come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb excludere, which combined the prefix ex-, meaning 'out', with claudere, meaning 'to shut' or 'to close'. The literal sense was therefore 'to shut out', and that physical image of closing a door against someone survives in the modern meaning of keeping a person or thing out of a group or count. English took it up in the late 1300s, originally in religious and legal writing where people could be formally barred or expelled. The same claudere root quietly sits inside a whole family of English words, including 'conclude' (to shut up an argument), 'include' (to shut in), 'seclude', and 'recluse', so the spelled cluster -clud- is the steady, recognisable signpost. Because the verb stem ends in a -de sound, the past tense simply adds -d, giving the tidy ending -ded that trips up writers who expect a doubled letter.

How the word is built

• ex- (out)
• clud (from Latin claudere: to shut, close)
• -ed (past tense suffix)