Relegated

How to spell relegated

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce relegated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does relegated mean?

1. verbPast tense of relegate: assigned or consigned someone or something to a lower, less important position.
2. verbPast tense of relegate: moved a sports team down to a lower league or division after poor results.

Relegated in a sentence

• The old printer was relegated to a corner of the storeroom.

• The club was relegated to the second division after losing the final match.

• After the restructure, she felt relegated to routine administrative tasks.

• Two teams were relegated at the end of a disappointing season.

Where does relegated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb relegare, which combined re-, meaning 'back' or 'away', with legare, meaning 'to send', 'to depute', or 'to dispatch on a mission'. In Roman usage relegare literally meant to send someone away, and it carried a specific legal sense of banishing a citizen to a remote place, a milder punishment than full exile. English took the word in during the early seventeenth century, at first keeping that idea of banishment before broadening into the modern sense of pushing something or someone down to a lower, less important position. The same legare root sits behind 'legate' (an envoy sent on official business) and 'delegate' (someone sent in your place), which is a useful reminder that the middle of the word is spelled leg, not lag. In British sport it gained its familiar meaning of dropping a team to a lower division, while everywhere it commonly means consigned to an inferior place.

How the word is built

• re- (back)
• leg (from Latin legare: to send, dispatch)
• -ate (verb suffix)
• -ed (past tense)