Gone

How to spell gone

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gone

What does gone mean?

1. verbThe past participle of 'go', used to say that someone or something has departed, left, or no longer exists.
2. adjectiveNo longer present, available, or alive; lost or used up.

Gone in a sentence

• verb

  By the time we arrived, the train had already gone.

• adjective

  The old factory is gone now, replaced by a row of flats.

• verb

  All the milk in the fridge was gone by Sunday morning.

• adjective

  With his savings gone, he had to take a second job.

Where does gone come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of the everyday verb 'go', which descends from the Old English gān, meaning 'to move, walk, or proceed'. The participle form once appeared as 'gan' or 'agone', and the older 'agone' survives today only in the poetic word 'ago'. Over the centuries the spelling settled on 'gone', with a silent final 'e' that does not lengthen the vowel as it normally would, which is part of what makes the word slightly irregular to write. It is closely related to its Germanic cousins, including the German 'gegangen', sharing the same ancient root for movement. Because 'go' has an unusual past tense ('went', borrowed from the unrelated verb 'wend') and a separate participle ('gone'), the verb is one of the most irregular in English.

How the word is built

• gone (irregular past participle of the verb go, from Old English gān)