Word.ws English Dictionary

empowered

empowered adjective: having been given powers. Also the simple past and past participle of empower.

Adjective

empowered (comparative more empowered, superlative most empowered)

  1. Having been given powers.
    • Empowered staff deliver the goods and exceed your expectations. Disempowered staff develop a 'sullen obedience' where they stop driving new initiatives and just await orders.2024 January 10, Chris Green, “Empowered...energised... and managing for success”, in RAIL, number 1000, page 22
  2. (US) Having been given the power to make choices relevant to one's situation.
    • Policy moderation in the past, I argued above, has depended on a coalition between civic elites and newly empowered minorities—or at least a resolve by civic elites to discourage a racially polarizing politics of law and order.1995, Chicago Assembly, Lawrence B. Joseph, Crime, Communities, and Public Policy, page 288
  3. (US) Acting with confidence.

Noun

empowered (plural empowereds)

  1. One who is empowered.
    • The category of sex tourism, which assimilates phenomena ranging from southeast Asian brothels run for foreign men by international crime cartels with the covert support of national governments (see Hall, 1992 and Truong, 1990) to the 'sugar mummie' phenomenon wherein older women tourists travel to...1996, Tom Selwyn, The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth Making in Tourism, →ISBN, page 83
    • The coolest of these "empowereds" laugh with the shock jocks ogling the hotties and ragging on the fatties and the prudes.2003, Elle - Issue 220, page 188

Also used as

empowered is also the simple past and past participle of empower.

Examples of empowered in a sentence

  • John found that starting up his own business empowered him greatly in social situations.
  • 'Cause I finished with him, so I just felt kind of relieved and empowered afterwards, you know?
  • By occupying non-abject, empowered roles, people in prison ultimately create non-abject existences.

All 20 example sentences with empowered

Forms of empowered

Adjective
comparativemore empowered
superlativemost empowered
Noun
pluralempowereds

Origin of empowered

From empower + -ed.

Words formed from empowered

Questions about empowered

What does empowered mean?
Empowered means having been given powers.
What part of speech is empowered?
Empowered can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near empowered in the dictionary

  1. empoverished
  2. empoverishes
  3. empoverishing
  4. empoverisht
  5. empower
  6. empowered
  7. empowereds
  8. empoweree
  9. empowerees
  10. empowerer
  11. empowerers

Source and license

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