Dried

How to spell dried

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dried

What does dried mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of 'dry': made or became free of moisture.
2. adjectiveHaving had its moisture removed, often to preserve it.

Dried in a sentence

• verb

  She dried her hands on the kitchen towel before answering the phone.

• adjective

  The recipe calls for a handful of dried apricots and some chopped nuts.

• verb

  The paint dried overnight, so the second coat could go on by morning.

• adjective

  A jar of dried herbs sat next to the stove for easy seasoning.

Where does dried come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'dry', which descends from the Old English drȳgan, meaning 'to make dry', and the related adjective drȳge, 'without moisture'. Those words trace back to a Germanic root shared with Dutch droog and German trocken, all carrying the idea of something free of damp. The spelling change is the heart of the trap: when an English verb ends in a consonant plus 'y', the y turns to 'i' before the '-ed' ending, so 'dry' becomes 'dried' rather than the mistaken 'dryed'. The same rule shapes 'tried', 'cried', and 'fried', so learning it once covers a whole family of words. English has kept this consonant-plus-y to i pattern remarkably consistently since the medieval period, which is why the form looks settled today.

How the word is built

• dry (root, from Old English drȳge 'without moisture')
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix, with the y changing to i)