Dreamt

How to spell dreamt

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dreamt

What does dreamt mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of dream: experienced images or events in the mind while asleep, or imagined something as a wish.

Dreamt in a sentence

• She dreamt about her old house every night that week.

• He had always dreamt of running his own bakery.

Where does dreamt come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word comes from the Old English drēam, which surprisingly meant 'joy', 'mirth', or 'music' rather than anything to do with sleep. The modern 'sleeping vision' sense is thought to have been reinforced by the Old Norse draumr and related Germanic words such as the Dutch droom and German Traum, which carried exactly that meaning of a vision in sleep. By the Middle English period the two strands had merged and 'dream' settled into the sense we use today. The past-tense form 'dreamt' preserves an old Germanic habit of marking the past with a -t sound rather than -ed, a pattern still visible in pairs like 'leant', 'burnt', and 'leapt'. That -mt cluster is the spelling trap, because the word sounds as though it could end in '-md' or simply '-med', yet the historically correct form is spelt with a final t.

How the word is built

• dream (root: a vision during sleep, or to imagine)
• -t (Germanic past-tense ending, an older alternative to -ed)