Charged

How to spell charged

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce charged

What does charged mean?

1. verbPast tense of charge: demanded a price, accused formally, rushed forward, or supplied with electricity.
2. adjectiveFilled with energy, tension, or electricity; emotionally or electrically loaded.

Charged in a sentence

• verb

  The garage charged me far more than the original estimate.

• adjective

  The meeting became tense and emotionally charged after the layoffs were announced.

• verb

  Police charged the suspect with fraud after a long investigation.

• adjective

  The fully charged battery lasted through the whole journey.

Where does charged come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past tense and past participle of 'charge', which English took from the Old French 'chargier', meaning 'to load' or 'to burden'. That French verb descended from the Late Latin 'carricare', 'to load a wagon', built on 'carrus', the Latin word for a wheeled cart or wagon (the same root that gives us 'car', 'cargo' and 'carriage'). The original idea of physically loading something gradually branched into many figurative loads: a financial burden (a price or fee), a legal burden (an accusation laid on someone), a military rush forward (a 'loaded' attack), and eventually a quantity of electricity or explosive packed into something. The '-ed' ending is the ordinary regular past form, so the trap is never the suffix but the soft 'g' spelled with the 'ge' before it, which keeps the soft sound and gives 'charged' rather than the wrong 'charjed'.

How the word is built

• charge (from Latin carricare: to load)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)