Blooded

How to spell blooded

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce blooded

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does blooded mean?

1. adjectiveHaving blood, breeding, or temperament of a specified kind, usually in a compound such as warm-blooded or pure-blooded.
2. verbPast tense of blood: to have initiated someone into a difficult activity through direct experience.

Blooded in a sentence

• adjective

  The farm was known for its pure-blooded herd of cattle.

• verb

  The young recruits were blooded during their first week on the front line.

• adjective

  Reptiles are cold-blooded and rely on the sun for warmth.

• verb

  The new analysts had not yet been blooded in a real crisis.

Where does blooded come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on the native English noun blood, which in Old English was blod, the word for the red fluid circulating in the body. That noun goes back to the Germanic ancestor that also gave Dutch bloed and German Blut, all carrying the same basic bodily sense. By adding the ending -ed, English formed an adjective meaning 'having blood of a specified kind', a pattern seen in compounds such as warm-blooded, cold-blooded, and blue-blooded. From the idea of inherited blood came the breeding sense, so a 'blooded' animal was one of good pedigree. The hunting verb sense, meaning to give someone their first taste of bloodshed or experience, grew from the same root and was popular in field-sport language by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

How the word is built

• blood (Old English blod: the fluid in veins)
• -ed (adjective/past-participle suffix)