Headquartered

How to spell headquartered

13 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce headquartered

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does headquartered mean?

1. verbHaving its main offices or central base located in a particular place.

Headquartered in a sentence

• The bank is headquartered in a glass tower near the river.

• The charity was headquartered in a small market town for decades.

Where does headquartered come from?

Language of origin: French

This word grows out of 'headquarters', a military term first recorded in the 1640s for the place where a commander and staff were lodged. 'Head' is the native Old English word heafod, meaning the top or chief part, used here in the sense of 'principal' or 'commanding'. 'Quarters' comes through Old French quartier, meaning a district, lodging, or station, which itself traces back to the Latin quartus, meaning 'fourth' (a quarter being literally a fourth part of something, later any allotted lodging or area). By the nineteenth century 'headquarters' had spread from armies into business and administration to mean a central office, and the verb 'to headquarter', meaning to base or locate an organisation somewhere, gave rise to the past form 'headquartered'. The spelling trap lives in the silent 'qu' cluster and the 'ar' that sounds like a plain 'er', so writers often drop a letter from 'quarter'.

How the word is built

• head (chief, principal)
• quarter (from quartier: a district or lodging)
• -ed (past/adjectival suffix)