Flung

How to spell flung

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flung

What does flung mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of fling: threw or moved something with sudden force.

Flung in a sentence

• She flung her coat onto the chair and collapsed on the sofa.

• The storm flung branches across the motorway overnight.

Where does flung come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Flung is the past tense and past participle of the verb fling, which appears in Middle English as flingen, meaning to rush, dash, or throw with force. The word is most likely of Scandinavian origin, related to the Old Norse flengja, meaning to flog or to whip, and its earliest English uses carried a sense of violent, sudden movement before it settled into the modern idea of hurling something through the air. Fling belongs to a small family of strong verbs that mark the past with a vowel change rather than the usual -ed ending, much like cling becomes clung and sling becomes slung. That pattern is exactly why flung is spelled with a u rather than the i of the present form, and the matching -ung group makes it easy to remember by association. The folk sense of a brief, carefree adventure, as in a holiday fling, grew out of the same idea of throwing oneself energetically into something.

How the word is built

• fling (to throw forcefully) with vowel change to the past form flung (strong verb pattern)