Flown

How to spell flown

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flown

What does flown mean?

1. verbThe past participle of 'fly': having travelled through the air, or having operated or been carried in an aircraft.

Flown in a sentence

• By the time the storm hit, the last plane had already flown out.

• She has flown across the Atlantic dozens of times for work.

Where does flown come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of the verb 'fly', which descends from the Old English flēogan, meaning 'to move through the air on wings'. Old English handled this verb as a strong verb, forming its past participle as flogen, and over centuries that ending settled into the modern -own pattern we also see in 'grown', 'blown', and 'sown'. The root traces back to a wider Germanic family, with relatives such as the German fliegen, and it is closely tied to the noun 'flight' and to the insect name 'fly'. The spelling trap is the silent, soft -own ending: the word sounds like it rhymes with 'tone', yet it is written with the same group-of-letters pattern as its strong-verb cousins rather than as 'flone'. Remembering that flown joins grown, blown, and thrown keeps the -own ending firmly in place.

How the word is built

• fl- (root of fly, from Old English flēogan: to move through the air)
• -own (strong-verb past-participle ending, as in grown and blown)