spared

[spaird]

adjective

1. left intact; not damaged, punished, destroyed, killed, etc..

   After a seven-month siege they captured the city, and the spared captives were taken into exile.

   After a brain injury in early childhood, language function is typically transferred to the spared hemisphere.

2. dispensed with or done without.

   I finally obtained a little ready money by converting some easily spared articles of jewelry into cash.

3. used frugally or not used; withheld; not spent.

   At no spared effort or expense, the enhanced design protocol has been applied to all the products in our new lineup.

verb

1. the simple past tense and past participle of spare.

Other Word Forms

• unspared adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of spared¹

First recorded in 1575–85; spare ( def. ) + -ed ² ( def. ) for the adjective senses; spare ( def. ) + -ed ¹ ( def. ) for the verb sense

Example Sentences

Ahmed said his life was only spared after a Wagner commander made a call to a Malian army officer, who assured him that the shop owner was not colluding with the jihadists.

Read more on BBC

This follows reports that the banking sector would be spared when Treasury chief Rachel Reeves outlines her plans for tax increases and spending changes on Wednesday, Interactive Investor’s Victoria Scholar says in a market comment.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

To mirror the real world, the Land of Sweets was not spared from an evil nutcracker tyrant.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

Although Northern California has been spared massive fires for the last few seasons, Schwartz fears that luck could run out if the region doesn’t receive at least an average amount snow this year.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

At this point, university economics departments had mostly been spared of the scandals that have hit other fields, including materials science, where a blockbuster finding on room-temperature superconductivity was invalidated in 2023.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

Related Words

• immune