Unearthed

How to spell unearthed

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce unearthed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does unearthed mean?

1. verbDug something out of the ground, or brought a hidden fact or object to light.

Unearthed in a sentence

• The builders unearthed a stash of old coins while digging the foundations.

• The auditor unearthed a series of payments that nobody had recorded.

Where does unearthed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'unearth', which was assembled entirely from native English parts rather than borrowed whole. The core is 'earth', from the Old English 'eorthe', meaning the soil, the ground, or the world itself, a word shared with the Dutch 'aarde' and German 'Erde'. The prefix 'un-' here carries its reversing, undoing sense, the same force it lends to 'undo' and 'untie', so 'unearth' literally means to take something back out of the earth. The compound verb appears from the late 1500s, originally describing the very physical act of digging a fox or other animal out of its underground hole during a hunt. From that concrete burrow-digging image the meaning broadened to cover unearthing buried treasure, fossils, and bodies, and then drifted into the figurative sense of bringing hidden facts or secrets to light. The spelling is wholly transparent once you see the seam: 'un' plus 'earth' plus 'ed', with nothing silent or foreign to trip over.

How the word is built

• un- (reverse, undo)
• earth (the ground, soil)
• -ed (past tense/participle)