Suspected

How to spell suspected

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce suspected

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does suspected mean?

1. verbBelieved something to be true or someone to be guilty, usually without firm proof.
2. adjectiveBelieved to be present or to be the cause, but not yet confirmed.

Suspected in a sentence

• verb

  The manager suspected that the figures had been altered.

• adjective

  Engineers traced the fault to a suspected gas leak under the road.

• verb

  Detectives suspected the neighbour from the very first day.

• adjective

  The hospital isolated every suspected case of the infection.

Where does suspected come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past form of 'suspect', which English took from the Latin verb suspicere, literally meaning 'to look up at' or 'to look from below'. That verb combined the prefix sub-, here in the form sus- meaning 'under' or 'secretly', with specere, 'to look', so the original picture is of glancing covertly at someone rather than meeting their eye openly. From that furtive sideways glance grew the sense of regarding a person with mistrust or imagining that something is wrong. English borrowed it through Old French in the late 1300s, and the same specere root still shows in everyday relatives such as 'inspect', 'spectator' and 'spectacle'. The spelling holds onto the Latin spect cluster, which is the part writers must keep intact, while the unstressed first syllable can tempt people toward a misspelling.

How the word is built

• sus- (variant of sub-: under)
• spect (from Latin specere: to look)
• -ed (past-tense/participle suffix)