Facilitated

How to spell facilitated

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce facilitated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does facilitated mean?

1. verbMade an action, process, or outcome easier or helped it to happen.

Facilitated in a sentence

• The new software facilitated a much faster month-end close.

• A neutral mediator facilitated the talks between the two departments.

Where does facilitated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin adjective facilis, meaning 'easy' or 'easily done', which itself grew from the verb facere, 'to do' or 'to make'. From facilis the Italians coined facilitare, 'to make easy', and French picked it up as faciliter; English borrowed the verb facilitate in the early 1600s with the straightforward sense of making an action or process easier to carry out. The same facere root sits inside a whole family of familiar English words, including 'factory', 'manufacture', and 'facile', which is a useful reminder that the spelling keeps a single c and a single l. The deceptive part for writers is purely auditory: the run of weak, unstressed vowels in fa-CIL-i-ta-ted blurs together in speech, so it is easy to lose track of which vowels and how many consonants belong there. Holding on to the idea of making something 'easy' (facilis) helps anchor the -cil- in the middle.

How the word is built

• facil- (from Latin facilis: easy)
• -itate (verb-forming suffix)
• -ed (past-tense suffix)