Vaccinated

How to spell vaccinated

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce vaccinated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vaccinated mean?

1. verbTreated with a vaccine to produce immunity against a disease.

Vaccinated in a sentence

• Every nurse on the ward was fully vaccinated before the flu season.

• The clinic confirmed that all the children had been vaccinated on schedule.

Where does vaccinated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin vacca, meaning simply 'cow', which seems a curious origin for a medical term. The link comes from the English physician Edward Jenner, who in the 1790s noticed that dairy workers who had caught cowpox seemed protected against the far deadlier smallpox. He coined 'vaccine' from the Latin vaccinus, meaning 'of or from a cow', to describe material taken from cowpox sores. From the noun came the verb 'vaccinate', recorded in English by the early 1800s, with 'vaccinated' as its past form. The unexpected cow connection is also a handy spelling memory: the word keeps the doubled 'c' of vacca, which is exactly the letter pair adults most often drop.

How the word is built

• vacc- (from Latin vacca: cow)
• -in- (relating to)
• -ate (verb-forming suffix)
• -ed (past tense/participle)