Bought

How to spell bought

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bought

What does bought mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of 'buy': obtained something in exchange for money.

Bought in a sentence

• I bought the tickets yesterday.

• I bought flowers for the table.

Where does bought come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'buy', which comes from the Old English bycgan, meaning 'to acquire by paying a price'. The past form bohte goes back to the same early roots, and that older spelling explains why the modern word keeps its silent 'gh', a leftover from a guttural sound that Anglo-Saxon and Middle English speakers actually pronounced at the back of the throat. Over the centuries that throaty sound faded out of speech, but the 'gh' stubbornly survived in the spelling, which is exactly what trips writers up today. The word has stayed remarkably stable in meaning for over a thousand years: it has always concerned the act of obtaining goods in exchange for money. Its near twin in appearance, 'brought' (the past of 'bring'), shares the same Old English -ohte pattern and is the chief reason people confuse or misspell the two.

How the word is built

• bought (past tense and past participle of 'buy', from Old English bohte)

Words that sound like bought

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

• bot: An automated software program that performs tasks online, often without human intervention.