Infected

How to spell infected

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce infected

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does infected mean?

1. adjectiveAffected by harmful germs, a disease, or malicious computer code.
2. verbPassed a disease, germ, or harmful program into a person, animal, or system.

Infected in a sentence

• adjective

  The infected wound turned red and needed a course of antibiotics.

• verb

  The virus infected thousands of commuters within a single week.

• adjective

  Her laptop was completely infected with malware after the dodgy download.

• verb

  A single careless email infected the entire office network.

Where does infected come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin verb inficere, which literally meant 'to put in' or 'to dip into', formed from the prefix in- meaning 'into' and facere meaning 'to make' or 'to do'. In Roman usage the sense quickly drifted toward 'to stain', 'to dye', and then 'to taint or corrupt', the idea being that something soaked into a substance and changed it for the worse. The past participle infectus passed through Old French and into Middle English in the late 1300s, at first describing things that had been poisoned, tainted, or morally corrupted. Only later did the medical sense of disease passing from one body to another become dominant. The same facere root that gives the soft 'fect' here also sits inside familiar relatives like 'affect', 'perfect', and 'factory', and remembering that hidden 'fect' is the key to the spelling, since the word never doubles a letter and never adds a stray vowel.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• fect (from Latin facere: to make, do)
• -ed (past participle / adjective suffix)