Killed

How to spell killed

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce killed

What does killed mean?

1. verbPast tense of kill: caused the death of a living thing.
2. verbPast tense of kill: stopped, switched off, or put an end to something.

Killed in a sentence

• The late frost killed most of the seedlings in the garden.

• She killed the engine before climbing out of the car.

• The accident killed two people on the motorway.

• The committee killed the proposal at the final vote.

Where does killed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word kill appears in Middle English as cullen or killen, meaning 'to strike' or 'to deaden', and it is generally traced to an Old English root related to cwellan, 'to slay or put to death'. In its earliest uses it could mean simply to beat, knock, or quench rather than specifically to take a life, and only gradually narrowed to the sense of ending a life that dominates today. The past tense killed is formed in the regular way, by adding the suffix -ed to the root, and because the root ends in a single short vowel followed by a single consonant, the final l is doubled before the ending, giving the double-l spelling. That doubling is the only real spelling point to watch, since the word otherwise behaves like any ordinary regular verb. The word has stayed close to its everyday Germanic roots and never picked up the silent letters or foreign endings that trip writers up elsewhere.

How the word is built

• kill (Old English cyllan: to strike, deaden)
• -ed (past tense suffix)