Lit

How to spell lit

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lit

What does lit mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of 'light': set burning, ignited, or made bright.
2. adjectiveInformal slang meaning very exciting, lively, or excellent.

Lit in a sentence

• verb

  She lit the candle with a single match.

• adjective

  The concert was absolutely lit from the opening song.

• verb

  The technician lit the stage just before the rehearsal began.

• adjective

  Everyone agreed the office party turned out surprisingly lit this year.

Where does lit come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'light', which comes from Old English 'lihtan' (also spelled 'leohtan'), meaning 'to set alight' or 'to make bright'. That verb grew directly out of the Old English noun 'leoht', the ancestor of modern 'light', a native Germanic word shared with Dutch 'licht' and German 'Licht'. The short, clipped form 'lit' arose through the same long-standing pattern that gives English 'sit' and 'sat' or 'spit' and 'spat', where a vowel shortens in the past form. In more recent decades 'lit' picked up a lively slang sense meaning 'exciting' or 'excellent', a usage that spread widely through music and social media in the 2010s. Because the word is so short and follows a familiar irregular pattern, its spelling almost never trips up adult writers.

How the word is built

• lit (irregular past tense and past participle of the verb 'light')