Impacted

How to spell impacted

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce impacted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does impacted mean?

1. adjectiveStrongly affected or influenced by something, often negatively.
2. adjectiveOf a tooth, wedged against another so that it cannot emerge normally.
3. adjectivePressed or packed firmly and tightly together.

Impacted in a sentence

• Local businesses were badly impacted by the road closure.

• The dentist said her wisdom tooth was impacted and would need removing.

• The snow on the path had become impacted and slippery.

• The report listed every department impacted by the budget cuts.

• An impacted molar can cause swelling and persistent pain.

• Years of foot traffic left the soil tightly impacted.

Where does impacted come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb impingere, meaning 'to drive in' or 'to strike against', which was formed from the prefix in- ('into') and pangere ('to fix, fasten, or drive in'). The past participle of impingere was impactus, literally 'driven in' or 'wedged', and that is the form English borrowed. For centuries the word kept a very physical sense of something pressed or packed tightly together, which survives in dentistry, where an impacted tooth is one wedged firmly against another so it cannot emerge. Only in the twentieth century did 'impact' blossom into the now common figurative sense of having a strong effect, giving us 'impacted' to mean 'affected'. The same pangere root also lies behind 'compact' and 'pact', and remembering that buried 'pact' is a handy way to keep the spelling intact.

How the word is built

• im- (in, into)
• pact (from Latin pangere: to fix, fasten, drive in)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)