Plotted

How to spell plotted

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce plotted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does plotted mean?

1. verbPast tense of plot: secretly planned something harmful or deceptive.
2. verbPast tense of plot: marked points on a chart, map, or graph, or planned a route.

Plotted in a sentence

• The disgruntled employees plotted to undermine the new manager.

• The analyst plotted each month's sales figures on a single graph.

• Investigators proved that the pair had plotted the entire fraud together.

• The navigator plotted a safe course around the storm.

Where does plotted come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word 'plot' comes from Old English 'plot', which simply meant a small patch or piece of ground, the same humble sense preserved today in 'garden plot' or 'burial plot'. During the sixteenth century the meaning widened dramatically: a 'plot' became a ground plan or diagram, and from there a secret scheme, a development helped along by the similar-sounding French word 'complot', meaning a conspiracy. The verb 'to plot' grew out of these noun senses, covering both the marking of points on a map or chart and the hatching of secret plans. The past tense 'plotted' follows the regular English rule that a short stressed vowel before a single final consonant doubles that consonant before '-ed', which is exactly why the single 't' of 'plot' becomes a double 'tt' here. Forgetting that doubling, and writing 'ploted', is the usual spelling slip. The root is Germanic, and its journey from a literal scrap of soil to a literary storyline is one of the tidier sense-shifts in English.

How the word is built

• plot (a small piece of ground; later a secret scheme or a diagram)
• doubled final -t
• -ed (past tense suffix)