Felt

How to spell felt

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce felt

What does felt mean?

1. verbThe past tense of 'feel': experienced an emotion, sensation, or impression.
2. nounA dense fabric made by pressing and matting wool or other fibres together rather than weaving them.

Felt in a sentence

• verb

  She felt exhausted after the long commute home.

• noun

  The craft kit included squares of coloured felt for the children.

• verb

  He felt a sharp pain in his knee during the run.

• noun

  A soft pad of felt protected the table from the lamp base.

Where does felt come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word actually covers two distinct strands that happen to share a spelling. As the past tense of 'feel', it descends from Old English 'felan', meaning 'to perceive or sense by touch', which produced the irregular past form rather than a regular '-ed' ending, much as 'keep' gives 'kept' and 'sleep' gives 'slept'. The fabric sense comes from a separate Old English noun 'felt', describing cloth made by pressing and matting wool fibres together with heat and moisture rather than weaving them. That noun has cousins across the Germanic languages, including the Dutch 'vilt' and German 'Filz', all pointing back to a root meaning 'to beat or press together'. Because both words were short native terms, the spelling stayed simple and stable for over a thousand years. The handy thing for a speller is that there is no silent letter or doubled consonant to trip over: it is exactly as it sounds.

How the word is built

• felt (single root; as a verb, the irregular past tense of 'feel', from Old English 'felan'; as a noun, from Old English 'felt', a matted fabric)