Transmitted

How to spell transmitted

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce transmitted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does transmitted mean?

1. verbSent, passed, or conveyed something (such as a signal, message, or disease) from one place, person, or thing to another.

Transmitted in a sentence

• The station transmitted the emergency broadcast across the whole region.

• The report was transmitted to head office before the deadline.

Where does transmitted come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past form of 'transmit', which comes from the Latin verb transmittere, meaning 'to send across' or 'to send over'. It was built from trans, meaning 'across' or 'beyond', and mittere, meaning 'to send' or 'to let go', the same root that gives English a whole family of words including 'mission', 'missile', 'submit', and 'permit'. English took the verb up in the fifteenth century, first in the sense of passing something physical or a right from one party to another, and later extending it to passing signals, electricity, light, and disease. The spelling trap lives in the ending: the stress falls on the second syllable (trans-MIT), and because that final consonant is stressed and single, it doubles before the -ed, giving 'transmitted' rather than 'transmited'. Keeping the mit from mittere clearly in mind helps explain why the double t belongs there.

How the word is built

• trans- (across)
• mit (send, from Latin mittere)
• -ted (past-tense ending, with the final t doubled)