Wanted

How to spell wanted

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce wanted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wanted mean?

1. verbPast tense of want: desired, wished for, or felt a need for something.
2. adjectiveSought after, especially by the police, or much desired by others.

Wanted in a sentence

• verb

  She wanted a quieter office away from the main corridor.

• adjective

  The wanted man was finally traced to a flat near the station.

• verb

  They wanted to leave before the rush-hour traffic built up.

• adjective

  A long wanted promotion finally came through after years of effort.

Where does wanted come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The base verb want comes from Old Norse vanta, meaning 'to lack' or 'to be missing', which Norse settlers brought into northern England during the Viking age. For centuries its core sense was about absence: to want something was to be without it, a meaning that survives in phrases like 'for want of a better word'. From that idea of lacking, the meaning shifted toward desiring the thing one lacks, which became the dominant sense by the 1700s. The past-tense form wanted simply adds the regular -ed ending; because the root ends in a clear -t, the spelling stays tidy and the only common slip is forgetting that it has a single n and a single t before the suffix. The same Norse family also gave English the adjective 'wanting', meaning deficient or absent.

How the word is built

• want (to desire, from Old Norse vanta 'to lack')
• -ed (past-tense/past-participle suffix)