Suspend

How to spell suspend

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce suspend

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does suspend mean?

1. verbTo stop something for a time, or to bar a person from a role or activity for a fixed period.
2. verbTo hang something so that it is held up from above and does not touch the ground.

Suspend in a sentence

• The council voted to suspend the parking charges over the holiday weekend.

• The builders will suspend the heavy lamp from the ceiling beam.

• The referee can suspend a player for two matches after a serious foul.

• Engineers chose to suspend the walkway from steel cables.

Where does suspend come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin suspendere, which literally meant 'to hang up' or 'to hang from above'. It was formed from the prefix sub-, here in its sense of 'up from below', combined with the verb pendere, meaning 'to hang' or 'to cause to hang'. English took the word in during the 1300s through Old French suspendre, at first in the literal sense of hanging something and in the religious sense of barring a cleric from office. The same pendere root sits inside many familiar relatives such as 'pendant', 'pending' and 'depend', all of which carry the idea of something hanging or left hanging. That root is also the key to the spelling: the ending is -pend (to hang), never -pent, so the final letter is a clean d.

How the word is built

• sus- (variant of sub-: up from below)
• pend (from Latin pendere: to hang)