Boxed

How to spell boxed

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce boxed

What does boxed mean?

1. verbPast tense of 'box': placed or packed into a box or boxes.
2. verbPast tense of 'box': fought as a sport using the fists.
3. adjectivePackaged or sold in a box, as a complete set.

Boxed in a sentence

• verb

  The movers boxed every plate before loading the van.

• verb

  He boxed at amateur level for three years before turning professional.

• adjective

  The boxed set of the whole series sold out before Christmas.

• verb

  Once the orders were boxed, the warehouse staff sealed them for shipping.

• verb

  The two champions boxed for twelve rounds without a knockout.

• adjective

  A boxed chocolate assortment makes a tidy office gift.

Where does boxed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base word 'box' came into Old English as 'box', borrowed from the Latin 'buxus', which named the boxwood tree and the small containers carved from its hard, fine-grained timber. The Latin term itself was taken from the Greek 'puxos', also meaning the box tree. Because boxwood was a favourite material for turning little lidded vessels, the name of the tree slid over to mean the receptacle, and from there to any rigid container. The verb sense of packing something into such a container is recorded from the late Middle Ages, while the unrelated fighting sense of 'box' (to strike with the fist) appeared separately in the 1500s and may share roots with an old word for a blow. The inflected form 'boxed' simply adds the regular '-ed' ending, and the only spelling point to watch is that the final sound is a crisp 't' even though it is written '-ed'.

How the word is built

• box (container, from Latin buxus 'boxwood')
• -ed (past tense / participle suffix)