Learnt

How to spell learnt

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce learnt

What does learnt mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of 'learn': having gained knowledge or a skill through study or experience.

Learnt in a sentence

• She learnt French during the two years she lived in Lyon.

• By the end of the course he had learnt how to file his own tax return.

Where does learnt come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the British past-tense and past-participle form of the verb 'learn', which descends from the Old English leornian, meaning 'to acquire knowledge' or 'to study'. That verb belonged to the wider Germanic family and shared an ancient root with words meaning 'to follow a track', so the original idea was something like following a path to understanding; the same root also produced 'lore', the body of knowledge handed down. English long allowed two ways to mark the past, the regular '-ed' and the older '-t', which is why pairs such as 'spelt' and 'spelled' or 'burnt' and 'burned' survive side by side. Over the centuries British usage settled comfortably on 'learnt' while American usage drifted toward 'learned', and that split is exactly the spelling trap: writers exposed to both forms hesitate over the final consonant. The clipped '-t' ending simply preserves a very old way of saying the past that the language has never fully abandoned.

How the word is built

• learn (Old English leornian: to acquire knowledge)
• -t (past-tense/past-participle suffix)