Asserted

Part of speech: verb

Pronunciation: /əˈsɜːtɪd/

Definitions

1. To have strongly confirmed or declared a fact or opinion; to have firmly held and expressed a belief or stance; to have maintained the truth or legitimacy of a statement with conviction
2. Expressed a claim or opinion confidently and firmly
3. Stated something emphatically as true or certain

Etymology: The past form "asserted" is an inflection of "assert", so the interesting history is the verb's. It comes from Latin "asserere", whose core sense was physical rather than rhetorical. The Romans used it for laying a hand on someone to claim them as a free person, a legal gesture in disputes over whether a captive or servant was really free. The Latin verb is built from "ad" ("to") and "serere" ("join, put in a row"), so the original idea was of bringing something into contact with you and holding it there. From that act of physical claiming grew the wider senses of protecting, defending, and finally declaring something to be true. English took the word from the Latin participle "assertus", and the later sense of stating a fact firmly is where the modern meaning of "asserted" sits.

Synonyms: declared, stated, affirmed, maintained, claimed

Antonyms: denied, disputed, retracted, contradicted, doubted