Influenced

How to spell influenced

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce influenced

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does influenced mean?

1. verbHad an effect on someone's thinking, behaviour, or the outcome of something.

Influenced in a sentence

• Her early teachers influenced her decision to study law.

• The report strongly influenced the committee's final vote.

Where does influenced come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past form of 'influence', a word with roots in the Latin verb fluere, meaning 'to flow'. Medieval Latin formed the noun influentia, literally a 'flowing in', and astrologers used it for an unseen fluid they believed streamed down from the stars to shape human character and events. English borrowed the word through Old French around the 1300s, and the astrological sense of an invisible power acting on someone gradually became the everyday idea of one person or thing affecting another. The verb sense, 'to have an effect on', took hold by the 1600s, and adding the regular '-ed' ending gives the past form. The same fluere root flows through a whole family of relatives such as 'fluent', 'fluid', and 'affluent', and that hidden 'flu' spelling, rather than 'flue', is the part writers most often slip on.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• flu (flow, from Latin fluere)
• -ence (noun suffix)
• -ed (past tense/participle)