Billed

How to spell billed

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce billed

What does billed mean?

1. verbPast tense of bill: to have sent someone a demand for payment for goods or services.
2. verbPast tense of bill: to have publicly described or advertised something as a particular thing.

Billed in a sentence

• The garage billed the customer for parts that were never delivered.

• The concert was billed as her final live performance.

• Clients are billed at the end of each month for the hours worked.

• The conference was billed as the biggest tech event of the year.

Where does billed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The root noun 'bill' descends from the Medieval Latin bulla, which originally meant a rounded seal or the lump of wax used to authenticate a document, and by extension the sealed document itself. It travelled into English through Anglo-French bille during the 1300s, where it came to mean any formal written list or statement. From the idea of an itemised written statement grew the modern sense of a demand for payment, and from there the verb 'to bill', meaning to send someone such a demand. A separate but related strand gave 'bill' the sense of a public notice or poster, which is why a performer could be 'billed' as the star of a show. The doubled 'll' and the silent leap from this 'bill' to its homophone 'build' (a quite unrelated Old English word for constructing) are the main reasons writers slip when spelling 'billed'.

How the word is built

• bill (root: a written statement of charges)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)

Words that sound like billed

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• build: To construct something by putting parts or materials together.