Canceled

Part of speech: verb, adjective

Definitions

1. Called off so that an event or arrangement will not take place
2. Annulled or revoked, meaning it is no longer valid or effective
3. Stopped or withdrawn, causing something previously planned to not happen

Etymology: "Canceled" is the past tense and past participle of "cancel", so its history is that of the verb. The verb began as a physical act: to cross out writing with a lattice of intersecting lines. Its ancestor was Latin "cancellus", meaning a railing or lattice, a diminutive of "cancer", the Latin word for a lattice. Those latticed lines were the mark that made a document void, which is how a word about metal or wooden grids came to mean nullifying an agreement. The path into English ran through Old French and Anglo-Norman, where "canceler" carried the same sense of crossing out. Middle English took it up as "cancellen". The French side of the family drifted in a different direction: modern French "chanceler" means "to stagger or sway", a sense that looks unrelated but shares the same root.

Synonyms: abandoned, repealed, revoked

Antonyms: confirmed, approved