Hospitalized

How to spell hospitalized

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce hospitalized

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hospitalized mean?

1. verbAdmitted to a hospital so as to receive medical care.

Hospitalized in a sentence

• After the accident he was hospitalized for three days of observation.

• The elderly patient was hospitalized with severe pneumonia.

Where does hospitalized come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built on 'hospital', which came into English in the 1200s through Old French from the Latin hospitale, a noun meaning 'a guest-house' or 'a place of shelter'. That Latin word traces back to hospes, which curiously meant both 'host' and 'guest', the same root that gave us 'hospitality', 'hostel', 'hotel', and even 'hospice'. For centuries a hospital was simply a charitable lodging for travellers, pilgrims, and the poor, only narrowing to its modern medical sense by the 1500s and 1600s. The verb 'hospitalize', meaning to admit someone to a hospital for treatment, is a much later coinage, appearing only around the turn of the twentieth century by attaching the productive ending -ize to the noun. The added -ed marks the past tense or past participle, and the spelling trap lives in that quiet middle: an unstressed schwa that makes the 'pita' stretch easy to mishear and easy to misspell.

How the word is built

• hospital (from Latin hospitale: guest-house)
• -ize (verb-forming suffix)
• -ed (past tense/participle)

British and American spelling

Hospitalized is the American spelling. British English spells it hospitalised.