Cracked

How to spell cracked

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cracked

What does cracked mean?

1. adjectiveDamaged by a line or split in the surface, though not fully broken apart.
2. verbPast tense of crack: to have broken, split, or made a sharp snapping sound.
3. adjectiveInformally, slightly mad, foolish, or behaving in an irrational way.

Cracked in a sentence

• adjective

  The cracked windscreen failed the safety inspection.

• verb

  The ice cracked loudly as the temperature rose.

• adjective

  His cracked scheme to retire by thirty made his colleagues laugh.

• adjective

  She noticed a cracked tile near the bathroom door.

• verb

  She finally cracked the difficult code after hours of work.

• adjective

  The neighbours thought she was a bit cracked for swimming in winter.

Where does cracked come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English verb cracian, which literally meant 'to make a loud, sharp sound', the kind of noise a breaking branch or a thunderclap produces. The sense developed naturally from the sound of breaking to the act of breaking itself, so that something that snapped with a crack came to be described as cracked. The form belongs to the wider Germanic family, with related words in Dutch (kraken) and German (krachen), all echoing that same sharp report. By the late Middle Ages the figurative meanings had blossomed: a voice could crack, a reputation could crack, and from the 1600s a person whose mind seemed broken was said to be cracked. The spelling trap is simply the silent doubling logic: the base 'crack' already ends in a hard 'ck', and the regular past suffix '-ed' is pronounced as a crisp 't' here, which can tempt writers toward 'crackt'.

How the word is built

• crack (from Old English cracian: to make a sharp noise, break)
• -ed (past tense / adjective suffix)