Littered

How to spell littered

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce littered

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does littered mean?

1. verbDropped or strewn rubbish or objects carelessly across an area.
2. verbCovered or strewn untidily with a scattering of things.

Littered in a sentence

• The crowd littered the park with paper cups after the concert.

• Her desk was littered with unpaid invoices and old receipts.

• Someone had littered the stairwell with cigarette ends.

• The floor was littered with toys when she got home from work.

Where does littered come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of 'litter', a word that began far away from rubbish. It traces to the Latin 'lectus', meaning a bed or couch, which passed into Anglo-Norman French as 'litere', a portable bed or a heap of straw used as bedding. English took it in during the 1200s, first for a curtained couch carried on poles and then for the straw spread out for animals to lie on. From the loose, scattered straw came the sense of odds and ends strewn about, and by the 1700s 'litter' meant rubbish dropped carelessly, with the verb meaning to scatter such mess. The double 't' reflects the short vowel, and the plain '-ed' ending hides no trick beyond remembering that single base 'litter' already carries two t's.

How the word is built

• litter (scattered rubbish; from a bed of straw)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)