Brushed

How to spell brushed

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce brushed

What does brushed mean?

1. verbPast tense of brush: to have cleaned, smoothed, or lightly touched something using a brush or a sweeping motion.
2. adjectiveDescribing a material whose surface has been treated to give a soft nap or a dull, matte texture.

Brushed in a sentence

• verb

  She brushed her hair before the morning meeting.

• adjective

  The new appliances have a brushed steel finish that hides fingerprints.

• verb

  He brushed the crumbs from the table after lunch.

• adjective

  They bought brushed cotton sheets for the colder winter nights.

Where does brushed come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'brush', which English took from Old French during the 1300s. The Old French noun 'brosse' meant a bundle of bristles or brushwood, and it may go back further to a Late Latin or Germanic source describing rough, bristly twigs of the kind once tied together for sweeping. From the tool came the action: to brush originally meant to sweep or clean with bristles, and the sense soon widened to any light grazing touch, as when two people brush past one another in a crowd. The fabric meaning, as in 'brushed cotton', describes cloth whose surface has been worked with fine wires to raise a soft nap. The spelling is straightforward once you remember it is simply 'brush' with '-ed' added; the 'sh' stays put and the ending is pronounced with a crisp 't' sound despite being written '-ed'.

How the word is built

• brush (from Old French brosse: a brush, bristly thing)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)