Silenced

How to spell silenced

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce silenced

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does silenced mean?

1. verbMade quiet, or stopped from speaking or making noise.
2. adjectiveFitted with a device that suppresses sound, or having been forced into quiet.

Silenced in a sentence

• verb

  She silenced her phone before the interview began.

• adjective

  The detective in the film carried a silenced pistol.

• verb

  The new policy effectively silenced the union's complaints.

• adjective

  The silenced witnesses refused to repeat their earlier claims.

Where does silenced come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of the verb 'silence', which traces back to the Latin verb silere, meaning 'to be still or quiet'. From that verb Latin formed the noun silentium, 'a state of stillness or absence of sound', which passed into Old French as silence and entered English in the 1300s. For centuries the word was only a noun, but by the early 1600s English speakers had turned it into a verb meaning 'to make quiet', and the regular past form 'silenced' followed naturally. The very same silere root survives in the modern word 'silent', and noticing that shared root helps explain why the spelling keeps the 'e' before adding '-d'. A useful relative is 'desist' and 'still', though only the former shares Latin ancestry; the soft 'c' sounding like 's' is the main point where careful spellers slow down.

How the word is built

• sil- (from Latin silere: to be silent)
• -ence (noun-forming)
• -ed (past tense / participle suffix)