Crept

How to spell crept

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce crept

What does crept mean?

1. verbThe past tense of creep: moved slowly, quietly, or cautiously, often close to the ground or without being noticed.

Crept in a sentence

• She crept down the stairs so she would not wake the children.

• The cat crept along the fence toward the unsuspecting bird.

Where does crept come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'creep', which descends from the Old English crēopan, meaning 'to move with the body close to the ground' or 'to crawl'. That verb belonged to a strong Germanic class that changed its vowel to mark tense, and it has close relatives in Dutch kruipen and Old Norse krjúpa, both carrying the same idea of stealthy, low movement. Over the centuries the original strong past form was reshaped, and English settled on 'crept', formed by shortening the vowel and adding a -t ending rather than the regular -ed. The spelling trap lives in that ending: the word sounds like it might take -ed, but the standard form is the irregular -t. The sense also broadened from literal crawling to any slow, quiet, or gradual motion, such as fear that crept over someone or costs that crept upward.

How the word is built

• creep (Old English crēopan: to move with the body close to the ground)
• irregular past-tense vowel change (ee to e)
• -t past ending