Dotted

How to spell dotted

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dotted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dotted mean?

1. verbMarked with small round spots, or scattered about a surface like such spots.

Dotted in a sentence

• Small fishing villages dotted the coastline all the way north.

• The summer dress was dotted with tiny white spots.

Where does dotted come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from 'dot', which comes from the Old English 'dott', a word that originally meant the head of a boil or a small lump rather than a mark of ink. The sense narrowed over time to mean a tiny round spot or speck, and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it described the small points used in writing and printing. The verb 'to dot', meaning to mark with such points or to scatter things about like points on a surface, gave rise to the past tense and participle 'dotted', which doubles the final 't' before the '-ed' ending because the vowel before it is short and stressed. That doubling rule, the same one seen in 'spotted' and 'knotted', is the only real spelling trap here. The familiar phrase 'the dotted line', meaning the line of small marks where one signs a document, has kept the word in everyday use.

How the word is built

• dot (small round mark)
• -t- (doubled consonant)
• -ed (past tense / adjective suffix)