Hatched

How to spell hatched

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hatched

What does hatched mean?

1. verbBroke out of an egg, or caused young to emerge from eggs.
2. verbDevised or secretly brought a plan or scheme into being.
3. verbShaded a drawing or surface using fine parallel lines.

Hatched in a sentence

• Three of the duck eggs hatched overnight in the warm incubator.

• The two managers hatched a plan to cut costs without any layoffs.

• She hatched the shadows on the sketch with closely spaced pencil lines.

• The chicks hatched a full day earlier than the breeder expected.

• They hatched the whole marketing idea over a long weekend.

• The engraver hatched the metal plate to suggest depth and tone.

Where does hatched come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The everyday verb hatch comes from the Middle English hacchen, meaning to bring young out of an egg, and it is of Germanic origin, related to words in Danish and Swedish for breeding or producing offspring. By the late 1300s it was being used both for the chick breaking out of the shell and, figuratively, for a scheme or plot being brought into being, much as an egg quietly incubates before it suddenly opens. The completely separate sense found in drawing and engraving, where hatch means to shade a surface with fine parallel lines, arrived later from the Old French hacher, meaning to chop or cut, the same source that gives us hatchet and the cooking term hash. English speakers eventually spelled and pronounced both of these the same way, so the single form hatched now covers eggs, plans, and shading alike. The doubled t-c-h cluster is the spelling point worth noticing, since the word is built straightforwardly on hatch with a regular -ed ending.

How the word is built

• hatch (Middle English hacchen, to produce young from an egg)
• -ed (past tense suffix)