Bled

How to spell bled

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bled

What does bled mean?

1. verbPast tense of bleed: lost blood, or let liquid, colour, or money drain away.

Bled in a sentence

• The cut on his hand bled for several minutes before it clotted.

• The red shirt bled dye into the rest of the wash.

Where does bled come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'bleed', which descends from the Old English verb 'bledan', meaning 'to bleed' or 'to let blood'. That verb was formed from 'blod', the Old English word for blood, and the noun and verb have travelled together ever since. The vowel change you see in bleed and bled is a survival of a very old Germanic pattern in which the past tense was marked by switching the vowel rather than adding an ending, much as 'feed' becomes 'fed' and 'meet' becomes 'met'. That shortened vowel is exactly the spelling trap: writers sometimes want to keep the double 'e' of bleed, but the correct past form has a single 'e'. Related forms appear across the Germanic languages, all rooted in the same ancient word for blood.

How the word is built

• bled (irregular past tense and past participle of 'bleed', with the long vowel of bleed shortened to a short e)