Immersed

How to spell immersed

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce immersed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does immersed mean?

1. adjectiveDeeply involved or absorbed in an activity, so that one's full attention is taken up.
2. verbDipped or plunged something fully beneath the surface of a liquid (past tense of immerse).

Immersed in a sentence

• adjective

  He was so immersed in the report that he missed his lunch break.

• verb

  She immersed the brush in the paint before coating the door.

• adjective

  The students stayed immersed in the workshop for the entire afternoon.

• verb

  The technician immersed the circuit board in a cleaning solution.

Where does immersed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb immergere, formed from in- meaning 'into' and mergere meaning 'to dip' or 'to plunge'. The literal Latin sense was to push something completely beneath a liquid, and that physical meaning carried straight into English when the verb 'immerse' was adopted in the early 1600s. Over time the idea of being fully under the surface stretched into a figurative meaning: a person 'immersed' in a book or a task is mentally plunged into it and surrounded by nothing else. The same mergere root surfaces in several relatives the learner will know, including 'submerge' (to plunge under), 'emerge' (to come out from under), and 'merge' (to plunge together). The doubled m in the spelling is the trap, and it comes from the prefix in- assimilating to im- before the m of mergere, so two m sounds collapse into a single spoken sound but two written letters.

How the word is built

• im- (variant of in-: into)
• mers (from Latin mergere: to dip, plunge)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)