Cornered

How to spell cornered

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cornered

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cornered mean?

1. verbForced someone or something into a position from which there was no escape.
2. verbGained control of the supply of a commodity or stock in order to dominate its price.

Cornered in a sentence

• The police cornered the suspect in a dead-end alley.

• The brothers cornered the silver market and sent prices soaring.

• The frightened cat had cornered the mouse behind the bookshelf.

• A single firm had quietly cornered the regional grain trade.

Where does cornered come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense and participle of the verb 'corner', which itself grew out of the noun 'corner'. The noun came into English in the 1200s through Anglo-Norman French 'cornere', based on the Old French 'corne' meaning a corner or angle, which traces back to the Latin 'cornu', literally meaning 'horn', 'tip', or 'point'. The image is of the projecting point where two walls or edges meet, much like the pointed tip of an animal's horn. By the 1800s the verb had developed the figurative sense of driving a person or animal into a corner with no way out, and from there the financial sense of 'cornering' a market by buying up all available supply. The same Latin 'cornu' survives in words such as 'cornet' and 'unicorn', and remembering that 'corner' simply takes a plain '-ed' (with the doubled 'r' belonging to the base word, not the ending) keeps the spelling straightforward.

How the word is built

• corner (an angle or point where two lines meet, from Latin cornu: horn, point)
• -ed (past tense / adjective suffix)