Irritated

How to spell irritated

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce irritated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does irritated mean?

1. adjectiveFeeling slightly angry or impatient because of something annoying.
2. adjectiveOf skin or tissue, made red, sore, or inflamed by something.
3. verbPast tense of irritate: annoyed someone, or made a part of the body sore.

Irritated in a sentence

• adjective

  The constant drilling next door left her irritated by lunchtime.

• adjective

  The rough wool collar left his neck red and irritated.

• verb

  The dust in the old attic irritated his throat for the rest of the day.

• adjective

  He grew increasingly irritated at the slow checkout queue.

• adjective

  Her eyes were irritated after a long afternoon in the chlorinated pool.

• verb

  The repeated delays irritated everyone waiting at the gate.

Where does irritated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb irritare, which meant 'to excite, provoke, or enrage', and in its later medical sense 'to inflame'. Latin built the form on the same provoking idea that gives us the noun 'irritant', and the doubled r was already present in the Latin spelling. English adopted 'irritate' in the middle of the 1500s, first in the sense of stirring someone to anger and soon afterwards in the bodily sense of making tissue sore or inflamed. The participle 'irritated' then served as both a past-tense verb and a descriptive adjective for someone annoyed or for skin made red and tender. The spelling trap lives at the start: it is a single i followed by a doubled r (ir-r), then a single t before -ated, so writers who reverse the doubling write it wrong.

How the word is built

• irrit- (from Latin irritare: to provoke)
• -ate (verb-forming)
• -ed (past/participial suffix)