Inverted

Inverted is an adjective describing something that has been turned upside down, inside out, or reversed in order or orientation. The word derives from Latin invertus, the past participle of invertire, meaning to turn over. It is used across many fields to indicate a reversal of normal position, arrangement, or appearance.

In science and mathematics, inverted often describes a change of orientation or role. An inverted image is formed when light passes through a lens or reflects from a surface such that the resulting picture is flipped relative to the original scene. In mathematics and logic, inversion refers to operations that undo a previous action, such as computing an inverse function or an inverse of a matrix. In geometry, inversion can denote transformations that preserve some properties while reversing others, depending on the context.

In music, an inverted chord or interval changes the bass note while keeping the pitch class of the chord, altering the harmony’s bass line without adding new tones. In linguistics, subject–auxiliary inversion is used to form questions in many languages, and inverted word order can also occur for emphasis or in certain conditional constructions, such as “Had I known…”

Other common uses include the phrase inverted pyramid in journalism, which describes a writing structure that places the most important information at the top, and inverted commas in British English, referring to quotation marks. In everyday language, “inverted” also appears in contexts like inverted colors or patterns, where the usual color or tonal relationships are reversed.