Busted

How to spell busted

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce busted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does busted mean?

1. adjectiveBroken, damaged, or no longer functioning.
2. verbCaught doing something wrong, or arrested by police (informal).

Busted in a sentence

• adjective

  The dishwasher is busted again, so we are washing plates by hand.

• verb

  The cheats were finally busted when the manager checked the records.

• adjective

  He limped off the field with a busted ankle.

• verb

  Two suspects were busted at the border with stolen goods.

Where does busted come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Busted is the past form of the informal verb 'bust', which began life as a colloquial American pronunciation of 'burst'. That older word comes from the Old English 'berstan', meaning 'to break suddenly' or 'to fly apart', a verb with relatives across the Germanic languages. In the early nineteenth century American speech reshaped 'burst' into 'bust', dropping the 'r' sound, and the new form quickly gathered its own meanings: to break something, to go bankrupt, and, by the late 1800s, to catch or arrest a wrongdoer. The spelling simply adds the regular '-ed' ending, so the only real trap is remembering the single 't' before it rather than doubling. Although it started as slang, 'busted' is now thoroughly at home in casual writing on both sides of the Atlantic.

How the word is built

• bust (informal variant of burst/broken)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)