Incurred

How to spell incurred

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce incurred

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does incurred mean?

1. verbBrought a cost, loss, debt, or unpleasant consequence upon oneself through one's own actions.

Incurred in a sentence

• The company incurred heavy losses during the failed expansion.

• She incurred a late fee by missing the payment deadline.

Where does incurred come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of 'incur', which comes from the Latin verb incurrere, meaning literally 'to run into' or 'to run towards'. That verb was built from the prefix in- ('into' or 'upon') and currere, the Latin verb 'to run', the same root that gives us 'current', 'course', and 'occur'. The original idea of physically running into something shifted over time to the figurative sense of running headlong into a consequence, so that a person who incurs a debt or a penalty has, in a manner of speaking, run straight into it. English took the word over in the early 1400s, partly through Old French, and the financial and legal sense of bringing trouble or expense upon oneself was established by the 1500s. The spelling trap lives in the suffix: because the stress falls on the final syllable of 'incur', the r doubles before -ed, giving 'incurred' rather than the tempting single-r form.

How the word is built

• in- (into, upon)
• cur (from Latin currere: to run)
• -red (doubled r
• past-tense -ed)