Word.ws English Dictionary

appropriated

appropriated is the simple past and past participle of appropriate.

Meaning of appropriate

Verb

appropriate (third-person singular simple present appropriates, present participle appropriating, simple past and past participle appropriated)

  1. (transitive) To take to oneself; to claim or use, especially as by an exclusive right.
    • Let no man appropriate the use of a common benefit.
    Synonyms:
    help oneself
  2. (transitive) To set apart for, or assign to, a particular person or use, especially in exclusion of all others; with to or for.
    • A spot of ground is appropriated for a garden.
    Synonyms:
    allocate
  3. (UK, transitive) To annex (for example a benefice, to a spiritual corporation, as its property).
    • Some [benefices] were appropriated to secular ecclesiastical corporations176, William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, book, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] Clarendon Press, →OCLC
  4. (archaic, transitive) To make suitable to; to suit.
    • Under the towers were a number of gloomy subterraneous apartments with vaulted roofs, the use of which imagination was left to guess, and could only appropriate to punishment and horror.1790, Helen Maria Williams, Julia, Routledge, published 2016, page 67

See all 9 meanings of appropriate

Adjective

appropriated (not comparable)

  1. set aside for a specified purpose

Words formed from appropriated

Phrases with appropriated

Questions about appropriated

What does appropriated mean?
Appropriated means set aside for a specified purpose.
What is appropriated the simple past and past participle of?
Appropriated is the simple past and past participle of appropriate.
What part of speech is appropriated?
Appropriated is an adjective.

Words near appropriated in the dictionary

  1. appropriacy
  2. appropriate
  3. appropriate adult
  4. appropriate adults
  5. appropriate technology
  6. appropriated
  7. appropriately
  8. appropriateness
  9. appropriater
  10. appropriaters
  11. appropriates

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: appropriated (page history and authors); appropriate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-appropriated.ogg.

Cite this entry: “appropriated.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/appropriated. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.