Heightened

How to spell heightened

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce heightened

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does heightened mean?

1. adjectiveMade more intense, acute, or pronounced than usual.
2. verbMade or became more intense, severe, or pronounced (past tense of heighten).

Heightened in a sentence

• adjective

  Security at the airport was on heightened alert all weekend.

• verb

  The leaked memo heightened tensions between the two departments.

• adjective

  The merger created a heightened sense of uncertainty among staff.

• verb

  A touch of garlic heightened the flavour of the whole dish.

Where does heightened come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word traces back to the Old English heah, meaning 'high' or 'tall', and the related noun heahðu for 'high place' or 'summit', which over time became 'height'. From that noun English built the verb 'heighten' during the late Middle Ages by adding the suffix -en, which means 'to make' or 'to cause to become', so 'heighten' literally meant 'to make higher'. 'Heightened' is simply the past-tense and participle form, and by the 1600s it had moved beyond physical tallness into the figurative sense of making feelings, awareness, or effects more intense. The spelling trap lives in the cluster 'eigh': the letters follow the unusual 'ei' order and the gh is completely silent, a fossil of an old Germanic guttural sound that English long ago stopped pronouncing. The same silent-gh, ei pattern survives in close relatives such as 'high' and 'weight', which is exactly why writers second-guess whether it is 'hieght' or 'height'.

How the word is built

• height (from Old English heah, high)
• -en (verb-forming suffix: to make)
• -ed (past tense / participle)