Liked
verbPast tense of 'like': found something agreeable, enjoyable, or pleasing.
How to spell liked
5 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce liked
What does liked mean?
- verbPast tense of 'like': found something agreeable, enjoyable, or pleasing.
Liked in a sentence
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She liked the new café near her office.
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Everyone on the panel liked the candidate's proposal.
Where does liked come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
This is the past tense of the verb 'like', which descends from the Old English verb 'lician', meaning 'to please' or 'to be pleasing to'. Curiously, the original construction worked the other way around from today: rather than a person liking a thing, the thing 'liked' (pleased) the person, much as the older English 'methinks' worked. That sense survives faintly in the old phrase 'if it like you', meaning 'if it pleases you'. The word is purely Germanic, related to the Old English 'gelic' meaning 'similar' or 'alike', and to modern Dutch 'lijken' and German 'gleichen'. Over the Middle English period the meaning flipped so that the person became the subject, giving us the familiar modern 'I liked it'. The spelling trap is simply that the silent 'e' of 'like' is dropped before the '-ed' ending is added.
How the word is built
- like (to find agreeable, from Old English lician)
- -ed (past-tense suffix)
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