Burned
verbPast tense and past participle of burn: damaged, consumed, or set alight by fire or intense heat.
How to spell burned
6 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce burned
What does burned mean?
- verbPast tense and past participle of burn: damaged, consumed, or set alight by fire or intense heat.
Burned in a sentence
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The toast burned while she was busy answering the phone.
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He burned all the old paperwork in the garden incinerator.
Where does burned come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The base verb burn descends from Old English, where two closely related verbs merged: byrnan, an intransitive verb meaning 'to be on fire', and baernan, a transitive verb meaning 'to set something alight'. Both trace back to Proto-Germanic roots that also gave Old Norse brenna and modern German brennen, all carrying the core idea of flame and heat. Over the centuries the two Old English forms collapsed into the single modern verb burn, and English then layered the regular -ed ending onto it to form burned. English keeps two competing past tenses, burned and burnt, a tidy reminder that English often retained both a regular and an older irregular form; burned is the regular one and now the more common worldwide. The spelling is phonetic and predictable, with no silent letters to trip the writer.
How the word is built
- burn (Old English root meaning to be on fire or set alight)
- -ed (regular past tense and past participle suffix)
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