Dyed

How to spell dyed

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dyed

What does dyed mean?

1. verbPast tense of dye: to have given a fabric, hair, or material a new colour using a dye.

Dyed in a sentence

• She dyed the cotton curtains a deep navy blue.

• The wool was dyed with natural plant extracts at the mill.

Where does dyed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'dye', which descends from the Old English noun 'deag' meaning a colour or tint and its related verb 'deagian' meaning to colour something. The root sits squarely in the native Germanic vocabulary of English, with no Latin or French borrowing involved. For centuries the spelling wavered, and 'dye' and 'die' were sometimes used interchangeably on the page, which is precisely why the two survive today as a notorious homophone pair. To keep them apart, English deliberately preserved the unusual 'ye' spelling for the colouring word, and when the suffix is added the silent 'e' is dropped to give 'dyed', whereas the verb meaning to stop living gives 'died'. Remembering that the colour word keeps its 'y' is the surest way to avoid writing 'died' when you mean a change of colour.

How the word is built

• dye (to colour)
• -ed (past tense/past participle suffix)