Hammered

How to spell hammered

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hammered

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hammered mean?

1. verbStruck or shaped something repeatedly with a hammer or with heavy blows.
2. verbDefeated an opponent decisively, or criticised someone severely.
3. adjectiveExtremely drunk; intoxicated to a heavy degree.

Hammered in a sentence

• verb

  He hammered the nail flush into the fence post.

• verb

  The home team hammered their rivals by six goals.

• adjective

  By midnight half the wedding guests were completely hammered.

• verb

  The blacksmith hammered the glowing metal into a curved blade.

• verb

  Reviewers hammered the new phone for its poor battery life.

• adjective

  He got hammered at the office party and regretted it the next morning.

Where does hammered come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'hammer', which goes back to the Old English noun 'hamor', the striking tool. That Germanic word is related to forms across the northern languages, and an intriguing theory holds that 'hamor' originally meant 'stone' or 'rock', since the earliest hammers were simply shaped stones; the same idea survives in the Old Norse 'hamarr', which meant both a hammer and a crag or cliff. The noun became a verb in the medieval period, meaning to beat or shape something with repeated blows, and the regular -ed ending produced 'hammered'. Over time the verb gathered figurative senses, such as hammering out an agreement or hammering home a point. The modern slang use meaning 'very drunk' is much more recent, drawing on the image of someone thoroughly battered or knocked flat.

How the word is built

• hammer (from Old English hamor, a tool for striking)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)