Found

How to spell found

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce found

What does found mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of 'find': came upon, located, or discovered something.
2. verbTo establish or set up an institution, company, or organisation, typically providing the resources for it to continue.
3. verbTo melt metal and pour it into a mould to make an object.

Found in a sentence

• She finally found her car keys under the sofa cushion.

• Two engineers worked together to found the software company in their garage.

• The workshop uses an old furnace to found bronze bells for churches.

• The auditors found several errors in last year's accounts.

• The philanthropist gave money to found a scholarship for local students.

• Craftsmen learned to found iron into tools during the long winter months.

Where does found come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This single spelling actually carries two unrelated histories. The most common 'found' is the past tense and past participle of 'find', which descends from the Old English verb findan, meaning 'to come upon' or 'to discover'; the vowel shift from 'find' to 'found' is the same ancient strong-verb pattern seen in bind and bound or grind and ground. A completely separate verb 'to found', meaning to establish or set up, came into English in the 1300s from Old French fonder, which traces back to the Latin fundare, 'to lay the bottom or base of', from fundus meaning 'bottom' or 'foundation'; this is the root that also gives us 'fund' and 'foundation'. A third, more technical 'found' means to melt metal and cast it, and it comes through Old French fondre from the Latin fundere, 'to pour'. Because these strands all collapsed onto one short spelling, the word is rarely misspelled, but its tangled origins explain why 'found' can mean both 'discovered' and 'created from scratch'.

How the word is built

• found (past tense and past participle of 'find', from Old English findan); the separate 'establish' verb is found (from Latin fundare, to lay a base)