Remarried

How to spell remarried

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce remarried

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does remarried mean?

1. verbMarried again, having been married before through divorce or the death of a spouse.

Remarried in a sentence

• She remarried two years after her first husband died.

• He remarried quietly at the registry office last spring.

Where does remarried come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past tense of remarry, formed by adding the prefix re-, meaning 'again', to the verb marry. Marry itself came into English in the 1300s from the Old French marier, which traces back to the Latin maritare, meaning 'to wed' or 'to give in marriage'. That Latin verb was built on maritus, meaning 'husband' or 'married man', a word also linked to the idea of a young person ready to take a partner. The spelling trap lives entirely in the ending: because marry ends in a consonant plus y, the y becomes i before the -ed, giving remarried with a double r in the middle and a single one at the seam of the prefix. Writers who forget the y to i shift sometimes produce the wrong form, so the rule is worth fixing in memory.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• marri- (from marry, to wed)
• -ed (past tense, with y changed to i)