Highlighted

How to spell highlighted

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce highlighted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does highlighted mean?

1. verbDrew attention to something or made it stand out as especially important.
2. verbMarked passages of text with a bright colour so they stood out.

Highlighted in a sentence

• The report highlighted several risks the board had overlooked.

• She highlighted the key clauses in yellow before the meeting.

• Her presentation highlighted the savings the new system would deliver.

• He highlighted every spelling error in the draft for the editor.

Where does highlighted come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past-tense and participle form of 'highlight', a relatively modern compound built from two very old native English words: 'high', from Old English 'heah' meaning lofty or elevated, and 'light', from Old English 'leoht' meaning brightness or illumination. The noun 'highlight' first appeared in the early nineteenth century among painters and engravers, where it named the brightest spot in a picture, the point where light fell most strongly. From that visual sense it broadened to mean the most striking or memorable part of any event, and by the twentieth century 'highlight' became a verb meaning to draw attention to something. The familiar office sense, marking text with bright ink or a coloured screen background, grew up alongside the felt-tip highlighter pen in the mid twentieth century. Because the word is a plain compound, the spelling trap is the silent 'gh' inherited from 'light', a cluster that once represented a throaty sound long since lost from speech.

How the word is built

• high (elevated, bright)
• light (illumination)
• -ed (past-tense and participle suffix)