Installed

How to spell installed

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce installed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does installed mean?

1. verbPast tense of install: to have fixed equipment or fittings in place, or set up software for use.

Installed in a sentence

• The electrician installed the new oven yesterday afternoon.

• We installed the accounting software on every office computer last week.

Where does installed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Medieval Latin verb installare, formed from the prefix in- meaning 'into' and stallum, meaning a 'stall' or 'seat', a term that itself came from a Germanic root for a fixed standing place. In its earliest use it had a strikingly ceremonial sense: to install someone was literally to place them into their official seat, the way a bishop or a knight was formally seated in office. English picked it up through Old French installer in the late 1400s, and for a long time the religious and ceremonial meaning dominated. Only later did the sense broaden to setting any equipment or fitting firmly into place, and later still to loading software onto a computer. The spelling keeps the doubled 'l' of the base verb 'install', which is the small trap, since the noun 'stall' and the related word 'stable' share the same standing-still ancestry.

How the word is built

• in- (into, in)
• stall (place or fixed position, from Medieval Latin stallum 'seat, stall')
• -ed (past tense suffix)