Heard

How to spell heard

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce heard

What does heard mean?

1. verbThe past tense of hear: perceived a sound, or received information.

Heard in a sentence

• She heard the doorbell while she was upstairs.

• We heard the news of the merger before it was made public.

Where does heard come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Heard is the past tense of the verb hear, which descends from the Old English hieran (also spelled heran or hyran), meaning to perceive sound with the ear. That verb traces back to a common Germanic root, related to the Dutch horen and the German horen, all carrying the sense of listening and obeying. In its earliest English the word covered not just sensing noise but also heeding or obeying, a link still visible in phrases like to give someone a hearing. The spelling of the past tense kept the -ear- vowel cluster of the present tense even though the pronunciation shifted to a clipped vowel, which is exactly why heard is so easily muddled with its homophone herd. Remember that heard contains the whole word hear, since hearing is what the ear does.

How the word is built

• hear (Old English hieran, to perceive sound)
• -d (past tense ending)

Words that sound like heard

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• herd: A large group of animals, especially cattle or other livestock, kept or living together.