Zoned

How to spell zoned

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce zoned

What does zoned mean?

1. verbDesignated or divided an area for a particular use under planning rules.
2. adjectiveIn a dazed, inattentive, or detached state of mind.

Zoned in a sentence

• verb

  The council confirmed that the land was zoned for residential housing.

• adjective

  After the long flight he felt completely zoned and could barely follow the meeting.

• verb

  The waterfront site is zoned for commercial development only.

• adjective

  By the third hour of the lecture half the room looked zoned and unfocused.

Where does zoned come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is the past form of the verb 'zone', which descends from the Greek 'zone', literally meaning a belt or girdle worn around the waist. Ancient geographers borrowed the image to describe the broad bands of climate that seem to wrap around the globe, such as the torrid, temperate, and frigid 'zones'. The term passed into Latin as 'zona' and reached English through French in the late 1300s, at first keeping that geographic and astronomical sense of a belt-like region. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 'zone' had become a verb meaning to divide an area into sections for a defined purpose, especially in town planning, giving us the past form 'zoned'. The same Greek root still shows up in 'ozone', and the original belt sense survives faintly in the way a zone still wraps around or encircles something.

How the word is built

• zone (from Greek zone: belt, girdle)
• -ed (past tense / participle suffix)