Crushed

How to spell crushed

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce crushed

What does crushed mean?

1. verbPressed, squeezed, or broken into smaller pieces by force.
2. adjectiveDeeply upset or disheartened by a disappointment or loss.

Crushed in a sentence

• verb

  The recipe calls for two cloves of crushed garlic.

• adjective

  She felt crushed when the promotion went to someone else.

• verb

  The parcel arrived crushed flat at the bottom of the box.

• adjective

  He was utterly crushed by the rejection letter.

Where does crushed come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past form of the verb 'crush', which English borrowed in the early 1300s from Old French 'croissir' or 'cruisir', meaning 'to gnash the teeth, crack, or smash'. The Old French verb is thought to be of Germanic origin, related to words for crashing and grinding, and its early English uses described physically squeezing or breaking something into fragments. Over the centuries the meaning spread from the literal pressing of grapes, ore, or bone to figurative senses of overwhelming an enemy or flattening someone's hopes and feelings. The spelling trap here is small but real: the soft '-shed' ending sounds like a separate word, yet 'crushed' is simply 'crush' plus a regular '-ed', so the 'sh' belongs to the root and there is no extra letter. By the 1800s 'crushed' was also used loosely to mean bitterly disappointed, a sense still common today.

How the word is built

• crush (to press or break by force)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)