Handwritten

How to spell handwritten

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce handwritten

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does handwritten mean?

1. adjectiveWritten by hand with a pen or pencil rather than printed or typed.

Handwritten in a sentence

• She left a handwritten note on the kitchen table.

• The museum displayed a handwritten manuscript from the poet.

Where does handwritten come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound joining the noun 'hand' to 'written', the past participle of the verb 'write'. The verb itself goes back to the Old English 'writan', which originally meant 'to scratch, score, or carve', a memory of the days when letters were cut into wood or stone before ink and parchment took over. 'Hand' is likewise an ancient Germanic word, found in Old English as 'hand' or 'hond', and it carries the sense of personal, manual action here. Put together, the compound simply means produced by the hand rather than by machine, a distinction that only became worth drawing once printing and later typewriters existed. The spelling trap lives in the second half: 'written' keeps the doubled 't' that the single-syllable 'write' loses, a leftover of the rule that a short stressed vowel doubles the following consonant before the ending.

How the word is built

• hand (the hand)
• writ (from write, Old English writan)
• -en (past participle suffix)