Filled

How to spell filled

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce filled

What does filled mean?

1. verbPast tense of fill: made something full, or occupied a space, time, or position.

Filled in a sentence

• She filled the kettle and switched it on for tea.

• The dentist filled the small cavity in his back tooth.

Where does filled come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'fill', which descends from the Old English fyllan, meaning 'to make full', itself built directly on the adjective full. The word belongs to the same broad Germanic family that gave German 'füllen' and Dutch 'vullen', all carrying the core idea of bringing something to capacity. Because the base verb already ends in a doubled 'l', the past tense simply adds '-ed' to give 'filled', keeping both letters; this is the spelling point worth remembering, since the single sound can tempt writers to drop an 'l'. The meaning has stayed remarkably stable across more than a thousand years, expanding only into figurative uses such as filling a role or filling time. A useful relative is 'fulfil', which literally meant to 'fully fill' before it took on its modern sense of completing or satisfying.

How the word is built

• fill (Old English fyllan: to make full)
• -ed (past-tense/past-participle suffix)