Burdened

How to spell burdened

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce burdened

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does burdened mean?

1. adjectiveLoaded or weighed down by a heavy physical load or a difficult responsibility.

Burdened in a sentence

• The hikers felt burdened by their oversized packs on the long climb.

• She felt burdened with debt after the renovation went over budget.

Where does burdened come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past form of the verb 'burden', which descends from the Old English noun byrthen, meaning 'a load' or 'something carried'. That noun grew from the same ancient Germanic root as the verb 'bear', meaning to carry, so a burden was literally a thing borne. Over the centuries the spelling settled from byrthen into 'burden', and the figurative sense of a heavy responsibility or worry sat comfortably alongside the literal sense of a physical load. The participle 'burdened' simply adds the regular -ed ending, and because the root vowel sound is a flat schwa, writers sometimes hesitate over the unstressed 'e' in the middle. Its close relative 'birth', also from the carrying root, shows how widely this old idea of bearing has spread through English.

How the word is built

• burden (a load, from Old English byrthen)
• -ed (past tense / participle suffix)