Chopped

How to spell chopped

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce chopped

What does chopped mean?

1. verbCut something into pieces with quick, heavy strokes of a blade, in the past tense.
2. adjectiveDescribing food that has been cut into small pieces.

Chopped in a sentence

• verb

  She chopped the carrots before adding them to the soup.

• adjective

  The recipe calls for a handful of chopped parsley.

• verb

  The gardener chopped the fallen branch into firewood.

• adjective

  She sprinkled chopped walnuts over the salad.

Where does chopped come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base verb 'chop' appears in English from around the 1300s, meaning to cut something with a quick, heavy stroke. Its exact roots are tangled: it is closely related to the older 'chap', meaning to crack or split (as in 'chapped lips'), and it may also draw on the Old French 'choper' or 'couper', meaning to strike or cut. The everyday kitchen sense, cutting food into small pieces, grew naturally from this idea of repeated downward blows with a blade. The past form 'chopped' simply adds the regular '-ed' ending, but because 'chop' ends in a single short vowel followed by a single consonant, that final 'p' is doubled before the suffix, which is the one spelling point worth remembering. The same doubling rule governs relatives like 'stopped' and 'shopped'.

How the word is built

• chop (to cut)
• -ped (past-tense ending with the consonant doubled after a short vowel)