Fought
verbPast tense and past participle of 'fight': engaged in physical or verbal conflict, or struggled hard for something.
How to spell fought
6 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce fought
What does fought mean?
- verbPast tense and past participle of 'fight': engaged in physical or verbal conflict, or struggled hard for something.
Fought in a sentence
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They fought over the last seat.
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They fought over the last slice of cake.
Where does fought come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'fight', which descends from the Old English feohtan, meaning 'to contend in battle' or 'to strive'. The strong verb formed its past tense as feaht in the singular and fuhton in the plural, and these older forms carried the rough guttural sound once spelt with the letters 'gh'. By the Middle English period the verb had settled into 'fought', though the original throaty consonant that 'gh' once represented fell silent over the centuries, leaving a spelling that no longer matches its sound. The same silent 'ough' pattern appears in relatives like 'brought', 'sought', and 'thought', all of which freeze an old pronunciation that English speakers stopped saying long ago. That mismatch between the simple 'awt' sound and the four-letter 'ough' spelling is exactly the trap that catches writers.
How the word is built
- fought (past tense and past participle of 'fight', from Old English feaht/fuhton)
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