Supported

How to spell supported

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce supported

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does supported mean?

1. verbHeld up, bore the weight of, or gave help, approval, or backing to someone or something (past tense).

Supported in a sentence

• The steel beam supported the entire weight of the roof for decades.

• Her colleagues supported the proposal at the budget meeting.

Where does supported come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past-tense and past-participle form of the verb 'support', which English took from the Old French 'supporter' in the 1300s. That French verb descended from the Latin 'supportare', a compound of 'sub', meaning 'under' or 'from below', and 'portare', meaning 'to carry' or 'to bear'. The literal sense was therefore 'to carry from underneath', which is exactly the physical idea behind holding something up, and the figurative sense of backing a person or cause grew naturally out of bearing their weight. The same 'portare' root sits inside a whole family of everyday words such as 'transport', 'export', and 'porter'. The spelling trap is small but real: the unstressed second syllable swallows its vowel, so the '-port-' is easy to render correctly while the linking vowel before '-ed' simply attaches without doubling anything.

How the word is built

• sup- (variant of sub-: under, from below)
• port (from portare: to carry)
• -ed (past-tense/participle suffix)