Fed

How to spell fed

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fed

What does fed mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of feed: gave food or nourishment to a person, animal, or system.
2. nounInformal term for a federal agent or officer, especially in the United States.

Fed in a sentence

• verb

  She fed the dog before leaving for work.

• noun

  The smugglers feared a fed was watching the warehouse.

• verb

  The river fed the reservoir all through the rainy season.

• noun

  In the film, a young fed goes undercover with the gang.

Where does fed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of 'feed', which descends from the Old English verb fedan, meaning 'to give food to' or 'to nourish'. That verb was built on the same Germanic root that gave us the noun 'food', so feeding and food are close cousins rather than coincidental neighbours. Like several short, very old English verbs (lead/led, breed/bred, read/read), feed forms its past tense by shortening the long vowel rather than adding the regular -ed, which is why the spelling drops to a single 'fed'. The slang noun sense, a 'fed' meaning a federal agent or officer, is a much later American clipping of 'federal' that became common in the twentieth century. Both uses are spelled identically, but they have entirely separate roots.

How the word is built

• fed (irregular past tense and past participle of feed, from Old English fedan 'to feed')