Identified

How to spell identified

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce identified

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does identified mean?

1. verbRecognised or established who or what someone or something is.

Identified in a sentence

• The witness identified the suspect from a line of photographs.

• The lab identified the bacteria responsible for the outbreak.

Where does identified come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past-tense and past-participle form of the verb 'identify', which reached English in the seventeenth century from the medieval Latin identificare, meaning 'to make the same'. That coinage was built on the Latin pronoun idem, which literally meant 'the same', combined with the verb facere, 'to make or do'. The original idea was to treat two things as one and the same, so to 'identify' something was to recognise it as being the very thing it claimed to be. From that root English also gained 'identity' and 'identical', all sharing the idem core. The doubled 'i' in the middle and the silent shift to '-ied' before the suffix are the spots where writers stumble, since the spoken word gives no clear hint of the second syllable's vowel.

How the word is built

• ident- (from idem: the same)
• -ify (to make)
• -ed (past tense suffix)