Burnt

How to spell burnt

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce burnt

What does burnt mean?

1. adjectiveDamaged, blackened, or charred by fire or excessive heat.
2. verbPast tense and past participle of burn: to have destroyed or damaged something with fire or heat.

Burnt in a sentence

• adjective

  The smell of burnt toast filled the kitchen.

• verb

  She burnt the old letters in the garden incinerator.

• adjective

  He scraped the burnt edges off the casserole before serving it.

• verb

  He burnt his hand on the oven door.

Where does burnt come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Burnt is the past form of the verb 'burn', which comes from Old English. Old English actually carried two related verbs, the intransitive byrnan 'to be on fire' and the transitive bærnan 'to set on fire', both descended from a Germanic root meaning to blaze or consume with flame, and over the centuries they merged into the single modern verb. The same Germanic ancestry links 'burn' to words in Dutch (branden) and German (brennen), and even to the 'brand' once meaning a piece of burning wood. The ending in -t rather than -ed is an old strong-and-weak survival: English long allowed -t past forms (as in 'dealt', 'spelt', 'learnt'), and British writing kept burnt comfortably while American writing leaned toward 'burned'. The trap for spellers is simply that single -t, since the regular-sounding 'burned' tempts the eye, yet burnt is one fixed, unchanging word.

How the word is built

• burn (from Old English byrnan/bærnan: to be on fire, to consume by fire)
• -t (past-tense/participle ending)