Clothed

How to spell clothed

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce clothed

What does clothed mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of clothe: dressed someone, or provided someone with garments.
2. adjectiveWearing clothes; covered with garments.

Clothed in a sentence

• verb

  The charity fed and clothed hundreds of families that winter.

• adjective

  The dancers remained fully clothed throughout the performance.

• verb

  The toddlers were warmly clothed before the long walk to school.

• adjective

  He fell asleep fully clothed on top of the hotel bed.

Where does clothed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'clothe', which descends from the Old English clāþian (also written clǣþan), meaning 'to put garments on'. That verb was formed directly from the Old English noun clāþ, the ancestor of modern 'cloth', which referred to woven fabric and to a single garment. Because the verb keeps the silent 'e' of 'clothe' before adding '-ed', the result is the slightly awkward looking 'clothed' rather than anything spelled like the plural noun 'clothes'. The whole family is solidly Germanic, with related forms in Dutch and German for fabric and dress. The spelling trap is the 'the' in the middle: writers who hear the soft 'th' sound sometimes drop the 'e' or confuse it with the noun 'clothes'.

How the word is built

• cloth(e) (garment, cloth)
• -ed (past tense / participle suffix)