Undergone

How to spell undergone

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce undergone

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does undergone mean?

1. verbPast participle of undergo: to have experienced or passed through a process, change, or treatment.

Undergone in a sentence

• The building has undergone extensive repairs since the flood.

• She had undergone surgery twice before the doctors found the cause.

Where does undergone come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of the verb 'undergo', which descends directly from the Old English undergān, formed from the prefix under-, meaning 'beneath' or 'among', and gān, the ancestor of the modern verb 'to go'. In the earliest records the literal sense was closer to 'to go under' or 'to undergo' in the sense of submitting to something, and over the centuries the meaning settled into 'to experience or pass through' some process, change, or hardship. Because English keeps the irregular past participle 'gone' for 'go', the past participle of 'undergo' is the parallel 'undergone' rather than a regular '-ed' form, which is the spelling trap many adults stumble over. The word is a native Germanic survival rather than a later borrowing, sharing its second element with countless everyday words built on 'go', such as 'foregone' and 'bygone'. Its sense of patiently passing through an ordeal has stayed remarkably stable since the medieval period.

How the word is built

• under- (beneath, through)
• gone (past participle of go, from Old English gān 'to go')