Inferred

How to spell inferred

8 letters · 2 syllables

1 of the 20 people asked to spell inferred in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce inferred

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does inferred mean?

1. verbReached a conclusion from evidence or reasoning rather than from an explicit statement.

Inferred in a sentence

• From the unopened mail piling up, she inferred that he had been away for weeks.

• The auditor inferred a pattern of fraud after comparing the monthly figures.

Where does inferred come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of the verb 'infer', which English took from the Latin inferre, meaning literally 'to carry in' or 'to bring in', formed from the prefix in- 'into' and the verb ferre 'to carry or bring'. In Latin the word could mean to bring something forward, including bringing forward a conclusion, and that logical sense is what survived. English adopted it in the 1500s, and by the early 1600s it had settled into its modern meaning of drawing a conclusion from evidence rather than from a direct statement. The same ferre root powers a whole family of English words such as 'transfer' (carry across), 'refer' (carry back), and 'defer' (carry away), and like those relatives 'infer' doubles its final r before the ending because the stress lands on that last syllable. That doubled r is the classic spelling trap: writers who say 'in-FERD' often write the single-r 'infered', which is wrong.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• fer (from Latin ferre: to carry, bring)
• -red (-ed past tense, with the r doubled because the stress falls on the final syllable)