Standardized

How to spell standardized

12 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce standardized

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does standardized mean?

1. verbMade uniform or brought into conformity with a single agreed model or measure.

Standardized in a sentence

• The company standardized its invoice templates across every department.

• The exam board standardized the marking criteria so results stay consistent.

Where does standardized come from?

Language of origin: French

The base word standard arrived in English in the 1100s through Old French estandart, which named the flag or rallying banner that an army gathered around in battle; that Old French term most likely came from the Frankish Germanic phrase meaning roughly 'stand firm' or 'stand hard', describing a banner planted upright in the ground. Because such a banner served as the fixed point everyone measured their position against, the word drifted by the 1300s and 1400s into the sense of an agreed measure of weight, length, or quality. The verb standardize, meaning to bring things into conformity with a single agreed model, was coined much later, in the late 1700s, by adding the productive suffix -ize (from the Greek -izein, which forms verbs meaning 'to make or cause to become'). The form standardized is simply its past tense and past participle, and the spelling trap lives in that quiet middle: the unstressed 'ard' and the choice between -ized and -ised, the latter being the more common British alternative.

How the word is built

• standard (a fixed norm)
• -ize (verb-forming suffix)
• -ed (past tense/participle)

British and American spelling

Standardized is the American spelling. British English spells it standardised.