Industrialized

How to spell industrialized

14 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce industrialized

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does industrialized mean?

1. adjectiveHaving developed large-scale manufacturing and advanced economic production.

Industrialized in a sentence

• The report compared healthcare costs across several industrialized nations.

• The region became heavily industrialized after the new factories opened.

Where does industrialized come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin industria, meaning 'diligence' or 'purposeful activity', which itself was linked to industrius, 'hard-working' or 'busy'. English borrowed 'industry' through Old French during the fifteenth century, and at first it simply meant skill, effort, or steady application rather than factories. The modern economic sense, organised manufacturing on a large scale, grew up alongside the technological changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and from it came the adjective 'industrial'. The verb 'industrialize' was then coined in the nineteenth century to describe the process of turning an economy or region toward large-scale manufacturing, and 'industrialized' is its past participle and adjective. The spelling trap here is the unstressed middle, the silent run of 'dustri', plus the choice of the -ize ending used in American and Canadian writing, where the same word appears as 'industrialised' across much of British usage.

How the word is built

• industri- (from Latin industria: diligence, activity)
• -al (adjective)
• -ize (verb-forming suffix, American/Canadian spelling)
• -ed (past participle/adjective)

British and American spelling

Industrialized is the American spelling. British English spells it industrialised.