Breathed

How to spell breathed

8 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce breathed

What does breathed mean?

1. verbDrew air into the lungs and let it out again; the past tense of breathe.

Breathed in a sentence

• The diver surfaced and breathed deeply before going under again.

• The patient breathed more easily once the oxygen mask was fitted.

Where does breathed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'breathe', which grew out of the Old English noun 'braeth', meaning a smell, an exhalation, or a vapour given off by something. In early English the noun referred as much to scent and steam as to the air of the lungs, and only gradually narrowed to mean the air a living thing takes in and lets out. The verb 'breathe' was then formed from that noun, gaining a final silent 'e' that the noun 'breath' never had; this is the heart of the spelling trap, because 'breath' is the noun and 'breathe' the verb, and 'breathed' keeps the verb's 'e' before adding '-ed'. The vowel also shifts in sound, the noun rhyming with 'death' and the verb with 'seethe', which is why the spellings drift apart in the mind. The root is firmly Germanic, with related forms across the older Germanic languages, and the word has carried its core meaning of drawing air since well before the Norman Conquest.

How the word is built

• breath (the air drawn in and out of the lungs)
• -ed (past tense suffix)