Fitted

How to spell fitted

6 letters · 2 syllables

16 of the 308 people asked to spell fitted in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce fitted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fitted mean?

1. verbPast tense and participle of fit: was the correct size or shape, or was installed in place.
2. adjectiveMade or shaped to follow a particular form closely, or built in to a fixed space.

Fitted in a sentence

• verb

  We just had new blinds fitted in the living room.

• adjective

  She bought a deep fitted sheet for the new mattress.

• verb

  The plumber fitted a new tap in the kitchen yesterday.

• adjective

  The flat came with a fitted kitchen and built-in cupboards.

Where does fitted come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

This is the past tense and participle of the verb 'fit', a word whose deeper origins are genuinely murky. 'Fit' surfaced in Middle English around the fifteenth century with the sense of being suitable or matching, and the tailoring sense of garments sitting correctly on the body grew naturally out of that idea of suitability. There is a separate older noun 'fit', meaning a section of a poem or a bout of illness, but the 'right size' verb seems to be a distinct strand whose precise source has never been pinned down, which is why dictionaries hedge on it. The doubled 't' in 'fitted' follows the regular English rule that a short stressed vowel before a single final consonant doubles that consonant before '-ed', the same pattern seen in 'batted' and 'potted'. American English often prefers 'fit' as the past form for the size sense, while British and Canadian writers reliably reach for 'fitted', and the adjective 'fitted' (as in a fitted sheet) is shared everywhere.

How the word is built

• fit (to be the right size or shape)
• -ted (past tense/participle suffix, with the final consonant doubled)

People who misspell fitted also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got fitted wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• undergo 40% of them got it wrong