prioritised

Prioritised is the past tense and past participle of prioritise, a verb meaning to designate something as more important or urgent than other items, or to arrange them in order of importance. It is widely used in professional and academic writing. The spelling prioritise is common in British and Commonwealth English; prioritised appears in many texts, while American English typically uses prioritized.

The act of prioritising involves evaluating needs, risks, and constraints, and applying criteria such as impact, urgency, and dependencies. The outcome is a prioritised list, backlog, or schedule that guides resource allocation, decision making, and sequencing of actions.

Fields such as project management, software development, healthcare, and public policy routinely employ prioritisation to focus limited resources on the most important items. In software development, backlog items are prioritised to determine what to build first. In healthcare, patient triage prioritises treatment according to severity.

Related terms include priority, prioritization, and prioritize. The form also appears in adjectival phrases, as in “the prioritised tasks” (British English), though “the prioritized tasks” is common in American English.

See also: Priority, Prioritization, Prioritize, Backlog.