Crammed

How to spell crammed

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce crammed

What does crammed mean?

1. verbForced or stuffed something into a tight or overfilled space, or studied intensively in a short burst.

Crammed in a sentence

• She crammed three weeks of clothes into one small suitcase.

• The commuters crammed onto the last train home.

Where does crammed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'cram', which descends directly from the Old English verb 'crammian', meaning to stuff or press something into a tight space. That word belongs to a broad Germanic family connected to the idea of crowding and squeezing things together, and it is related to old roots meaning to cram full or to pack. For centuries the word kept its literal sense of forcing food, goods, or people into too small a place, and only in the nineteenth century did the familiar student sense develop, describing the act of stuffing facts hastily into the memory before an exam. The spelling trap lives entirely in the ending: because 'cram' finishes with a single consonant after a short stressed vowel, that 'm' must double before '-ed', giving 'crammed' rather than the wrong 'cramed'.

How the word is built

• cram (to stuff, press tightly)
• -med (past tense; the single final consonant doubles after a short stressed vowel)