Refrigerated

How to spell refrigerated

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce refrigerated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does refrigerated mean?

1. adjectiveKept or made cold, especially to preserve food, by means of a cooling appliance or system.
2. verbCooled or chilled something, especially to keep it fresh, in the past.

Refrigerated in a sentence

• adjective

  The vaccine must stay refrigerated during the entire delivery.

• verb

  The courier refrigerated the medicine before loading it into the van.

• adjective

  Leftover soup should be stored in a refrigerated container overnight.

• verb

  She refrigerated the dough so it would firm up before baking.

Where does refrigerated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb refrigerare, meaning 'to make cool again' or 'to cool down', formed from the prefix re- together with frigus, the Latin noun for 'cold' or 'frost'. The same frigus root gives English the word 'frigid', and that family connection is worth remembering, because the letters f-r-i-g sit at the heart of refrigerated just as they do in frigid. The verb 'refrigerate' entered English in the fifteenth century, at first carrying the broad sense of cooling or relieving heat, including a now-obsolete medical use about cooling the body. Only with the rise of mechanical cold storage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did the modern sense, keeping food and goods cold by machine, become dominant. The 'refrigerator' that fills our kitchens is simply the agent noun of the same verb, which is why both share that tricky middle stretch of letters.

How the word is built

• re- (intensive/again)
• friger- (from Latin frigus: cold)
• -ate (verb-forming)
• -ed (past/adjective suffix)