Marked

How to spell marked

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce marked

What does marked mean?

1. adjectiveClearly noticeable or pronounced, easy to see or measure.
2. verbPast tense of 'mark': made a sign on something, graded work, or indicated a position.

Marked in a sentence

• adjective

  There was a marked improvement in sales after the new advertising campaign.

• verb

  The teacher marked every essay over the weekend before returning them.

• adjective

  The doctor noted a marked difference in his blood pressure between the two visits.

• verb

  She marked the correct route on the map with a red pen.

Where does marked come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The root 'mark' comes from the Old English 'mearc', which meant a boundary or a defined limit, and also the sign that showed where one piece of land ended and another began. This in turn traces back to a Germanic source shared with the German 'Mark' (a borderland) and even the place name element in 'march', the old word for a frontier district. Over centuries the sense widened from a physical boundary to any visible sign, scratch, or written stroke, and then to the act of making such a sign, giving us the verb 'to mark'. The form 'marked' adds the regular '-ed' ending, serving both as the simple past tense of the verb and as an adjective meaning clearly noticeable, as if a difference had been deliberately signed or stamped. Because the word is so old and native to English, its spelling has stayed plain and phonetic, with no silent letters to trip the writer.

How the word is built

• mark (sign, boundary, target)
• -ed (past tense / adjectival suffix)