Professed

How to spell professed

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce professed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does professed mean?

1. verbPast tense of profess: to have stated or claimed something openly, sometimes without it being wholly sincere.
2. adjectiveOpenly declared or self-described, often with a hint that the claim may be more for show than for substance.

Professed in a sentence

• verb

  She professed no knowledge of the missing funds during the audit.

• adjective

  As a professed vegetarian, he refused every dish on the meat menu.

• verb

  He professed his admiration for the new manager in front of the whole team.

• adjective

  Her professed aim was to retire before fifty and travel the world.

Where does professed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb profiteri, meaning 'to declare openly' or 'to acknowledge publicly', formed from pro- 'forth, out in the open' and fateri 'to confess or admit'. Its past participle, professus, gave English the verb 'profess', which arrived through Old French in the 1300s and originally carried a strongly religious flavour: to profess was to take the vows of a religious order, declaring one's faith aloud before others. From there the meaning broadened to any open declaration, whether sincere or merely claimed, and the inflected form 'professed' settled into use both as a past tense and as an adjective. The very same fateri root sits inside 'confess', which simply adds con- 'together, fully' to the same act of acknowledgement. The single s sounded out as part of -fess- is the small spelling cue that keeps the word steady, since adults sometimes hesitate over whether the ending doubles.

How the word is built

• pro- (forth, publicly)
• fess (from Latin fateri: to confess, acknowledge)
• -ed (past tense / adjectival suffix)