Visited

How to spell visited

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce visited

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does visited mean?

1. verbWent to see a person or place, or stayed somewhere temporarily, in the past.

Visited in a sentence

• They visited their grandmother every weekend last summer.

• We visited three museums during our trip to the city.

Where does visited come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of the verb 'visit', which English took from the Old French 'visiter' in the 1200s, originally in the religious sense of God or a priest coming to comfort or test someone. The French word descended from the Latin 'visitare', meaning 'to go to see' or 'to inspect', a frequentative form built on 'visere', 'to go to see', itself rooted in 'videre', 'to see'. That same 'videre' root gives us a whole family of sighting words such as 'vision', 'video', and 'evident'. Over the centuries the heavy religious overtone faded and the word settled into its plain modern meaning of calling on a person or place. The spelling stays delightfully regular: a single 's', a single 't', and the ordinary '-ed' ending, so the only trap is resisting the urge to double the 't' before adding the suffix.

How the word is built

• vis- (from Latin visere/videre: to see, go to see)
• -it (root extension)
• -ed (past-tense suffix)