Licked

How to spell licked

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce licked

What does licked mean?

1. verbPassed the tongue over something, typically to taste, clean, or moisten it.
2. verbSoundly beat or defeated an opponent, in informal use.

Licked in a sentence

• The dog licked the empty bowl until it shone.

• Our team licked the league champions on Saturday.

• She licked the envelope and pressed it shut.

• He licked his rival comfortably in the final round.

Where does licked come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'lick', which descends from the Old English liccian, meaning 'to pass the tongue over a surface'. That word belongs to a wide family of related forms across the Germanic languages, including the Old High German lecchon, and it ultimately traces back to a Proto-Indo-European root that imitated the action of the tongue. For most of its history the word stayed close to its literal sense of tasting or wiping with the tongue, as a cat cleans its fur or a child finishes an ice cream. By the early nineteenth century an informal sense of 'to thrash or defeat' had grown up, probably from the idea of beating an opponent soundly. The spelling is phonetically tidy: the base 'lick' simply takes the regular -ed ending, though the final consonant means it sounds like a 't' rather than a 'd'.

How the word is built

• lick (Old English liccian: to pass the tongue over)
• -ed (past tense suffix)