Stationed

How to spell stationed

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce stationed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does stationed mean?

1. verbPast tense of station: assigned or posted to a particular place, especially for duty.

Stationed in a sentence

• The soldiers were stationed along the northern border for six months.

• A security guard was stationed at every exit during the event.

Where does stationed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin statio, meaning 'a standing still', 'a post', or 'a place where one stands', which itself grew from stare, the verb 'to stand'. Latin statio passed through Old French as estation and entered English in the 1300s, at first naming a fixed standing place, such as a post for guards or a religious stopping point. From the noun 'station' English later formed the verb 'to station', meaning to assign someone to a fixed post, and 'stationed' is its past form. The same stare root underlies a whole family of standing words, including 'stationary' (not moving) and even 'stationery' (goods once sold from a fixed shop, a stationer's), which is why these look-alikes are so easily muddled. Remembering that everything here turns on standing in one place helps fix the -tion spelling that comes straight from the Latin statio.

How the word is built

• station (from Latin statio: a standing, a post)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)