Purified

How to spell purified

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce purified

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does purified mean?

1. adjectiveMade free from contaminants or impurities.
2. verbRemoved contaminants from a substance (past tense of purify).

Purified in a sentence

• adjective

  The laboratory stores its purified water in sealed glass bottles.

• verb

  The technicians purified the sample before running any tests.

• adjective

  The recipe calls for a teaspoon of purified coconut oil.

• verb

  The new filtration system purified the tank overnight.

Where does purified come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past form of 'purify', which English took from the Old French 'purifier' in the 1300s, itself drawn from the Latin 'purificare'. That Latin verb was built from 'purus', meaning 'clean' or 'unmixed', and the verb element '-ficare', a form of 'facere' meaning 'to make', so the literal sense was simply 'to make clean'. The same 'purus' root sits behind a family of familiar English words including 'pure', 'purity', and 'purge'. Early uses were often religious or ceremonial, describing the cleansing of a person or place, before the word settled into its broader modern sense of removing impurities from water, air, or chemical substances. The spelling trap is the middle vowel: the unstressed 'i' before the '-fied' ending is easy to drop or swap, even though it echoes the '-ify' of the base verb.

How the word is built

• pur- (from purus: clean, pure)
• -ify (to make)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)