Hurried

How to spell hurried

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hurried

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hurried mean?

1. adjectiveDone too quickly and without enough care or time.
2. verbMoved or acted quickly, often because of limited time.

Hurried in a sentence

• adjective

  A hurried breakfast left her feeling unsettled before the meeting.

• verb

  She hurried to the station after realising her train left early.

• adjective

  The report had a hurried feel, as though it was finished minutes before the deadline.

• verb

  The waiter hurried between tables during the lunch rush.

Where does hurried come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The base verb 'hurry' first surfaces in English around the late 1500s, with one of its earliest appearances in Shakespeare, and its ultimate origin is genuinely uncertain. Most scholars think it is imitative in nature, a word coined to suggest the bustle and confusion of rapid movement, perhaps echoing or blending with older words such as 'harry' (to harass or raid) and dialect forms like 'hurr' meaning to whirl. It may share a distant kinship with Middle High German 'hurren', meaning to move swiftly. The doubled r was fixed early and is why 'hurried' keeps two of them. The spelling trap comes from the suffix: because 'hurry' ends in a consonant plus -y, the y turns into an i before -ed, giving 'hurried' rather than 'hurryed'.

How the word is built

• hurry (root: to move quickly)
• -ied (past-tense/adjective suffix, with -y changing to -i before -ed)