Drained

How to spell drained

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drained

What does drained mean?

1. verbCaused liquid to flow away, leaving something empty or dry (past tense of drain).
2. adjectiveLeft feeling completely without energy, as though one's strength had flowed away.

Drained in a sentence

• verb

  The mechanic drained the old oil from the engine before the service.

• adjective

  After the long shift at the hospital she felt utterly drained.

• verb

  She drained the pasta and tipped it back into the warm pan.

• adjective

  Three back-to-back meetings left him mentally drained by lunchtime.

Where does drained come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base verb 'drain' comes from the Old English drēahnian, meaning 'to strain out' or 'to filter off liquid', and it is closely related to the word 'dry'; the underlying idea was making something gradually free of moisture. Over the centuries the spelling settled with the 'ai' vowel and the word broadened from straining liquids through cloth to the general sense of emptying water away through a channel or pipe. The form 'drained' simply adds the regular '-ed' ending to mark the past tense and past participle. By the 1800s the word had also taken on a vivid figurative use, describing a person emptied of energy as though their strength had flowed away like water. That shared image of fluid being pulled out is exactly why 'drained' works equally well for an emptied bath and an exhausted worker.

How the word is built

• drain (root, from Old English drēahnian: to strain out, dry up)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)