Dipped

How to spell dipped

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dipped

What does dipped mean?

1. verbPut something briefly into a liquid, or moved or sank downward for a short time.

Dipped in a sentence

• She dipped the brush in the paint before each stroke.

• The road dipped sharply just past the bridge.

Where does dipped come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'dip', which descends from the Old English dyppan, meaning 'to immerse' or 'to plunge briefly into liquid'. That word belonged to a family of Germanic words tied to the idea of something going down or sinking, sharing an ancestor with 'deep' and with the verb 'to dive'. By the time it took its modern shape, 'dip' had broadened well beyond bathing and dunking to cover any short downward movement, such as a road dipping or prices dipping. The spelling trap lives entirely in the ending: because 'dip' is a short word with a single vowel followed by a single consonant, the final 'p' doubles before '-ed', giving 'dipped' rather than the wrong 'diped'. Remembering the doubling rule for short stressed syllables is the key to spelling it correctly.

How the word is built

• dip (from Old English dyppan: to plunge briefly)
• -p- (doubled consonant)
• -ed (past tense suffix)