Treated

How to spell treated

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce treated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does treated mean?

1. verbBehaved towards or dealt with a person or thing in a particular way.
2. verbGave medical care or remedies to a patient or condition.
3. verbSubjected a material to a chemical or physical process to alter or protect it.
4. verbPaid for someone else's food, drink, or entertainment as a gift.

Treated in a sentence

• The manager treated every complaint with the same patience.

• The nurse treated the wound before sending him home.

• The timber was treated to resist rot and insects.

• He treated the whole team to dinner after the deal closed.

• She felt she had been treated unfairly during the review.

• Doctors treated the infection with a course of antibiotics.

Where does treated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of 'treat', which came into English in the 1300s from the Old French verb traitier, meaning 'to deal with' or 'to handle'. That word descends from the Latin tractare, 'to handle, manage, or deal with', which was a frequentative form of trahere, 'to drag or pull'. The same trahere root quietly survives in many English relatives such as 'tractor', 'traction', and 'attract', all of which carry the underlying idea of pulling or drawing. The sense steadily broadened from physically handling something to dealing with people, to providing medical care, and even to standing someone a meal or a pleasure. The spelling keeps the 'ea' digraph and a single 't' before the ending, which is the main point where careful writers should pause.

How the word is built

• treat (from Latin tractare: to handle, manage)
• -ed (past-tense suffix)