Eaten

How to spell eaten

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce eaten

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does eaten mean?

1. verbThe past participle of eat, used to describe food that has been consumed.

Eaten in a sentence

• By the time she arrived, the cake had been eaten down to the last crumb.

• He had not eaten a proper meal all day before the meeting.

Where does eaten come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of the verb 'eat', which descends from the Old English etan, meaning 'to consume food'. That verb traces back to a shared Germanic root that also gave German 'essen' and Dutch 'eten', and beyond that to an ancient Indo-European root meaning 'to bite' or 'to eat', which likewise underlies the Latin 'edere' and the modern word 'edible'. The '-en' ending is one of the old strong-verb past participle markers in English, the same suffix seen in 'taken', 'fallen', and 'broken', preserved from a time when many verbs formed their past forms by changing the vowel and adding this ending rather than by adding '-ed'. The spelling stays steady because both parts are short and native, though the single 't' before '-en' occasionally trips writers who expect a double letter.

How the word is built

• eat (Old English etan: to consume food)
• -en (past participle suffix)