Chased

How to spell chased

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce chased

What does chased mean?

1. verbRan after someone or something in order to catch, reach, or drive it away (past tense of chase).

Chased in a sentence

• The dog chased the postman down the front path.

• Two patrol cars chased the stolen van across the city.

Where does chased come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past tense of the verb 'chase', which English took from the Old French chacier, meaning 'to pursue' or 'to hunt'. That French verb traces back to a Vulgar Latin form captiare, a frequentative built on the classical Latin capere, meaning 'to take' or 'to seize'. The same Latin root gave English a whole family of relatives, including 'capture', 'captive', and, by a separate northern French route, the everyday word 'catch', which is essentially a doppelganger of 'chase'. The word arrived in Middle English in the 1200s already carrying the sense of running after something to catch it. Note that the spelling trap is purely aural: 'chased' sounds exactly like 'chaste', meaning pure, so memory must lean on the -se base of the verb plus the regular -ed ending.

How the word is built

• chase (from Old French chacier: to pursue)
• -ed (past tense suffix)