Dressed

How to spell dressed

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dressed

What does dressed mean?

1. verbPut clothing on oneself or another, or arranged something into a finished state, at a time now past.
2. adjectiveWearing clothes, or wearing clothes of a particular kind or for a particular occasion.

Dressed in a sentence

• verb

  She dressed quickly before the early morning meeting.

• adjective

  The guests arrived smartly dressed for the evening reception.

• verb

  The children dressed themselves without any help today.

• adjective

  She was already dressed and ready to leave by seven.

Where does dressed come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past tense of 'dress', which English took from the Old French verb dresser, meaning 'to arrange', 'to set up straight', or 'to make ready'. That French word descended from an unrecorded Vulgar Latin form directiare, built on the Latin directus, the past participle of dirigere, meaning 'to set straight' or 'to direct'. When the word arrived in English in the 1300s it carried this broad sense of putting things in order, and only later did it narrow toward the everyday meaning of putting clothes on the body. Traces of the older 'arrange and prepare' sense survive in phrases like dressing a wound, dressing a salad, and dressing a shop window. The doubled s and the silent-sounding -ed ending are the small spelling traps here, since the final cluster is pronounced as a crisp 'st' even though it is written 'ssed'.

How the word is built

• dress (from Old French dresser: to arrange, make ready)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)