Featured

How to spell featured

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce featured

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does featured mean?

1. verbGave prominence to a person, item, or topic; presented it as a main element.
2. adjectiveGiven special prominence; presented as the main or highlighted element.

Featured in a sentence

• verb

  The magazine featured her photography across six full pages.

• adjective

  She was the featured speaker at the annual conference.

• verb

  Last night's documentary featured three families on tight budgets.

• adjective

  The featured product sat at the top of the catalogue.

Where does featured come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the inflected form of 'feature', which came into English in the 1300s from the Old French 'faiture', meaning 'a form' or 'a fashioning', itself drawn from the Latin 'factura', literally 'a making' or 'a formation', built on the verb 'facere', meaning 'to make' or 'to do'. In its earliest English use it described the make or shape of the body, and soon narrowed to the form of the face, which is why we still speak of someone's facial features. From the sense of a distinctive part it broadened to mean any prominent characteristic, and later a prominent item in a newspaper or a presentation. The verb sense, 'to give prominence to', grew naturally from this and gave us the past form 'featured'. The same Latin 'facere' lies behind a huge family of English words such as 'manufacture', 'factory', and 'fact', and the 'feat-' spelling preserves that older French shape rather than the Latin 'fact-'.

How the word is built

• feature (form, characteristic; from Latin factura 'a making')
• -ed (past tense / adjective suffix)