Transcribed

How to spell transcribed

11 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce transcribed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does transcribed mean?

1. verbPut spoken words, recorded audio, or another form of text into written form, or copied it out exactly.

Transcribed in a sentence

• The court reporter transcribed every word of the testimony.

• She transcribed the interview from the recording before lunch.

Where does transcribed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb transcribere, which combined trans, meaning 'across' or 'over', with scribere, meaning 'to write'; the literal sense was to write something over again in another place, in other words to copy it out. Roman scribes used it for transferring text from one document to another, and the meaning has stayed remarkably close ever since. English took the verb in during the 1500s, largely through legal and scholarly contexts where copying records by hand was routine work. The scrib root is enormously productive and still surfaces in everyday relatives such as 'describe', 'scribble', 'manuscript', and 'inscribe', so spotting that shared 'scrib' core helps lock in the spelling. The trap in transcribed is mostly the quiet trans- joining a 'scr' cluster, plus the unstressed first syllable that can tempt writers toward 'tran' without the second consonant.

How the word is built

• trans- (across, over)
• scrib (from scribere: to write)
• -ed (past-tense suffix)