Cursed

How to spell cursed

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cursed

What does cursed mean?

1. verbSwore in anger, or called down harm or misfortune on someone or something.
2. adjectiveAfflicted by or laden with a curse; suffering persistent bad luck or harm.

Cursed in a sentence

• verb

  He cursed under his breath when the printer jammed again.

• adjective

  The novel follows a cursed family that loses everything across three generations.

• verb

  The stranded driver cursed the broken sat-nav for the wrong turn.

• adjective

  Local legend claims the old mine is cursed and that workers never prosper there.

Where does cursed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English noun 'curs', meaning a prayer or wish that harm fall on someone, along with its matching verb 'cursian', to call down evil upon a person. The deep origin of 'curs' is genuinely murky; it appears in late Old English without obvious relatives in the other Germanic languages, which is unusual, so scholars have never settled it with confidence. One long-standing suggestion connects it to the Latin 'cursus', meaning a course or running, by way of a church Latin sense of a set form of words read aloud, though this remains debated. By the medieval period the verb had spread to cover both invoking supernatural harm and simply swearing in anger, and the inflected form 'cursed' served as both the past tense and an adjective. The two-syllable adjective pronunciation that survives in solemn or literary speech preserves the older habit of sounding the '-ed' ending fully, which is why the spelling keeps that 'e' even when the everyday verb is said as a single clipped syllable.

How the word is built

• curse (root, from Old English curs: a malediction)
• -ed (past tense / adjectival suffix)