Kept

How to spell kept

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce kept

What does kept mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of keep: to have held, retained, or continued something.

Kept in a sentence

• She kept every receipt in case the accountant needed them.

• He kept his promise to call his mother every Sunday.

Where does kept come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'keep', which comes from the Old English 'cepan', meaning 'to seize, hold, observe, or take notice of'. The exact older roots of 'cepan' are surprisingly murky for such a common word, and its early relatives in other Germanic languages are hard to pin down, so the deep origin is considered uncertain. What is clear is that English long ago formed its past tense by shortening and changing the vowel rather than simply adding the regular '-ed' ending, which is why we say 'kept' and not 'keeped'. This pattern, where a long vowel shortens and the verb takes a '-t' rather than '-d', also gave us pairs like 'sleep' and 'slept', 'sweep' and 'swept', and 'creep' and 'crept'. The spelling trap is simply that the smooth-sounding word ends in 'pt' with no 'e', so writers must resist any urge to insert a vowel.

How the word is built

• keep (Old English cepan: to hold, guard)
• past-tense vowel change (e→e-pt, no -ed)