Uniformed

How to spell uniformed

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce uniformed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does uniformed mean?

1. adjectiveWearing the standardised clothing of an official body such as the police, armed forces, or a school.

Uniformed in a sentence

• Two uniformed officers guarded the entrance to the courthouse.

• A uniformed doorman greeted every guest at the hotel.

Where does uniformed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This adjective is built directly on the noun 'uniform', which English assembled in the sixteenth century from the Latin uniformis, meaning 'having one form' or 'of a single shape'. That Latin word joined unus, meaning 'one', to forma, meaning 'shape' or 'appearance', so the literal idea was something unvaried, all of one kind throughout. By the eighteenth century 'uniform' had settled into its now-familiar military and institutional sense: the standardised set of clothing worn by a body of people so they all look the same. Adding the English suffix '-ed', meaning 'having' or 'provided with', produced 'uniformed', describing a person dressed in such standard attire. The spelling trap is real, because dropping a single letter and stretching the word turns it into the unrelated 'uninformed' (lacking knowledge), which shares no part of the 'one shape' meaning at all.

How the word is built

• uni- (one, single)
• form (shape)
• -ed (adjective suffix: having)