Ditched

How to spell ditched

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ditched

What does ditched mean?

1. verbGot rid of, abandoned, or discarded something or someone, usually informally.
2. verbBrought a stricken aircraft down onto water as an emergency landing.

Ditched in a sentence

• She finally ditched her cracked old phone for a newer model.

• The pilot ditched the small plane in the harbour after both engines failed.

• The company ditched the outdated software after months of complaints.

• The crew ditched the aircraft offshore and waited calmly for the rescue boats.

Where does ditched come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'ditch', which traces back to the Old English noun 'dic', meaning a trench, channel, or dug-out hollow; the very same root gave us 'dyke', since digging a ditch and piling up the resulting earthwork were two sides of the same job. For centuries the word stayed close to that earthy sense, describing the trenches dug along fields and roads to carry water away. The verb later grew the figurative meaning of throwing something into a ditch and so abandoning or discarding it, which by the twentieth century became the common informal sense of getting rid of a thing or a person. A specialised aviation use also emerged, in which 'to ditch' means to bring a stricken aircraft down onto water as an emergency landing. The spelling keeps the simple 'tch' of the base word and merely adds the regular '-ed', so the only thing to remember is that the consonant cluster stays intact before the ending.

How the word is built

• ditch (from Old English dic: a trench or dug channel)
• -ed (past tense suffix)