Bugged

How to spell bugged

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bugged

What does bugged mean?

1. verbAnnoyed, irritated, or pestered someone persistently.
2. verbFitted a room, phone, or vehicle with a concealed listening device.

Bugged in a sentence

• The constant drilling next door really bugged me all afternoon.

• Investigators had secretly bugged the boardroom before the meeting.

• It bugged him that the report still had not been signed off.

• He suspected the rental car had been bugged by a private detective.

Where does bugged come from?

Language of origin: Celtic

This is the past tense of the verb 'to bug', which grew out of the noun 'bug'. The noun first appears in late Middle English as 'bugge', meaning a frightening creature or hobgoblin, a sense that survives in 'bugbear' and possibly traces back to a Celtic word such as Welsh 'bwg' meaning ghost or goblin. By the 1600s 'bug' had narrowed to mean a small crawling insect, especially a bedbug. The slang verb meaning 'to annoy or pester', as if buzzing at someone like an irritating insect, took off in American English in the 1940s. Around the same era 'bug' came to mean a concealed listening device, so 'to bug' a room meant to plant such a microphone; the doubled g in 'bugged' simply follows the English rule of doubling a final consonant after a short stressed vowel before adding an ending.

How the word is built

• bug (insect; later 'to annoy' or 'hidden microphone')
• -ged (past tense, with the final consonant doubled before the ending)