Bagged

How to spell bagged

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bagged

What does bagged mean?

1. verbPast tense of 'bag': put something into a bag, or caught, secured, or claimed something.

Bagged in a sentence

• The cashier bagged the groceries before handing over the receipt.

• She bagged the last discounted laptop minutes before the sale ended.

Where does bagged come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is the past tense of the verb 'bag', which grew out of the noun 'bag' for a soft container. The noun appears in English from around the 1200s and is generally traced to the Old Norse 'baggi', meaning a pack or bundle, the kind of load a traveller might sling over a shoulder. By the late Middle Ages 'to bag' meant to put something into a sack, and from there it took on the sense of catching or securing game in hunting, which is why hunters still talk of 'bagging' a bird. The informal modern sense of simply getting or claiming something ('bagged a bargain') follows the same idea of capturing and pocketing. The spelling trap is purely mechanical: because 'bag' ends in a single consonant after a short stressed vowel, that final 'g' doubles before '-ed', giving 'bagged' rather than 'baged'.

How the word is built

• bag (sack, container)
• -g- (doubled consonant after a short stressed vowel)
• -ed (past tense suffix)