incarcerated
- 1Simple past and past participle of incarcerate.
The state incarcerated thousands of people during that decade.
She had been incarcerated for nearly a year before the appeal succeeded.
Note
One regular -ed spelling does double duty here. It is the plain past (they incarcerated him) and also the participle after have or be (he had been incarcerated). Because the verb is transitive, it passivizes freely. The participle now does the work of an obsolete adjective, incarcerate, which once meant 'imprisoned' on its own. The meaning also reaches beyond prisons: something can be incarcerated simply by being shut in or hemmed in.
incarcerated is a form of incarcerate
incarcerate, verb: To lock someone away; to imprison them, especially for breaking the law. Full entry
- Forms
- incarcerateincarcerates he/she/itincarcerating -ing formincarcerated past tense, past participle
- Spelling
- incarcerate → incarcerated: add -d
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /ɪd/, an extra syllable.
Use it in a sentence
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