Hopped

How to spell hopped

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hopped

What does hopped mean?

1. verbPast tense of hop: made a short, light jump, or moved quickly from one place to another.
2. adjectiveFlavoured with hops, as a beer; often used to describe a strong, bitter character.

Hopped in a sentence

• verb

  The rabbit hopped across the lawn and vanished under the fence.

• adjective

  The brewery released a heavily hopped pale ale this spring.

• verb

  She hopped on the early train and reached the office before nine.

• adjective

  Critics praised the crisp, lightly hopped lager on the menu.

Where does hopped come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The everyday verb at the heart of this word comes from the Old English hoppian, meaning to spring or leap lightly, a word that belongs to the broad Germanic family and is related to forms in Old Norse and German for skipping and dancing movements. From its earliest days it described small, repeated jumps rather than one great leap, which is why we still hop on one foot or hop over a puddle. The past tense is formed by adding -ed, and because hop ends in a single consonant after a short stressed vowel, that final p doubles to keep the vowel short, giving hopped rather than hoped; this doubling rule is the only real spelling trap. A separate but related sense comes from the brewing world, where to hop a beer means to flavour it with hops, the dried flowers of a climbing plant whose name reached English from Middle Dutch hoppe in the fifteenth century. Both threads feed the modern word, but the leaping verb is by far the older and more common.

How the word is built

• hop (root verb: to make a short spring)
• -ped (past tense; the single final consonant doubles after a short stressed vowel)