Gripped

How to spell gripped

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gripped

What does gripped mean?

1. verbTook or held something tightly with the hands.
2. verbHeld someone's complete attention or seized them with a strong emotion.

Gripped in a sentence

• She gripped the railing as the bus lurched forward.

• The thriller gripped readers from the very first page.

• He gripped the steering wheel hard on the icy road.

• A sudden panic gripped the crowd when the lights failed.

Where does gripped come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb grip, which descends from the Old English grippan, meaning 'to seize, clutch, or grasp firmly'. That word belonged to a wider Germanic family alongside the Old English noun gripe, 'a grasp or hold', and it is closely related to the verb 'to gripe', which once also meant to clutch tightly before drifting toward its modern sense of complaining. When the suffix -ed is added, the single short vowel before the final consonant triggers the usual English doubling rule, so the p is doubled to keep the vowel short: that is precisely why it is spelled gripped and not griped, since 'griped' would suggest a long vowel and the unrelated meaning of complaining. The figurative sense, in which a story or fear grips a person, grew naturally out of the physical idea of being seized and held fast. The doubled consonant is the only real spelling trap here, and it follows the same logic as stopped, slipped, and trapped.

How the word is built

• grip (from Old English grippan: to seize, grasp)
• -p- (consonant doubled after a short stressed vowel)
• -ed (past-tense suffix)