Hugged

How to spell hugged

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hugged

What does hugged mean?

1. verbPast tense of hug: to have held someone or something closely in one's arms as a sign of affection.

Hugged in a sentence

• She hugged her daughter tightly before the train left.

• The old friends hugged warmly when they met at the airport.

Where does hugged come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is the past tense of the verb 'hug', a word whose precise origin is genuinely uncertain. The leading suggestion is a link to the Old Norse verb hugga, meaning 'to comfort, soothe, or console', which itself grew from hugr, a noun for 'mind', 'mood', or 'courage'. The word surfaces in English only in the late 1500s, much later than most everyday physical-action verbs, which is part of why its lineage is hard to pin down. The leap from 'comforting' someone to physically embracing them is an easy and natural one, since a hug is itself an act of comfort. The spelling of the past tense follows the standard English rule for a short, stressed, single-vowel word ending in one consonant: the final 'g' doubles before the '-ed' is added, giving 'hugged'.

How the word is built

• hug (root)
• -g- (doubled consonant)
• -ed (past tense suffix)