Notified

How to spell notified

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce notified

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does notified mean?

1. verbFormally informed someone of something, or gave official notice of it.

Notified in a sentence

• The bank notified every customer about the change in fees.

• She notified her landlord of the leak as soon as she found it.

Where does notified come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of 'notify', which English took from the Old French notifier in the late 1300s, itself drawn from the Latin notificare, meaning 'to make known'. That Latin verb was built from notus, the past participle of noscere 'to come to know', joined to facere 'to make or do'; so at its heart the word literally means 'to make something known'. The same notus root sits inside familiar relatives such as 'note', 'notice', and 'notorious', all of which circle around the idea of knowing or being known. The spelling trap in 'notified' is the silent shift at the end: the verb ends in -fy, but when the past tense is formed the y turns into an i before -ed, producing -ified rather than -fyed. Keeping the link to 'note' in mind helps fix the single t and the i in the stem.

How the word is built

• noti- (from Latin notus: known)
• -fy (from facere: to make)
• -ed (past tense; y becomes i before the ending)