Loved

How to spell loved

5 letters · 1 syllable

20 of the 340 people asked to spell loved in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce loved

What does loved mean?

1. verbFelt deep affection or strong attachment for someone or something in the past.
2. adjectiveDearly cherished or held in deep affection by others.

Loved in a sentence

• verb

  She loved reading her book in the evenings.

• adjective

  The school honoured a much loved teacher at the summer assembly.

• verb

  As a child he loved the long train journeys to his grandparents.

• adjective

  She was a deeply loved member of the family.

Where does loved come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past form of the verb 'love', which descends from the Old English lufian, meaning 'to feel affection for' or 'to hold dear', and the related noun lufu, meaning 'love' or 'affection'. These trace back to a Proto-Germanic root that also gave German 'lieben' and the same family lies behind the English words 'belief' and 'leave' (in the sense of permission). The deeper Indo-European root carried a sense of 'to desire' or 'to care for', and it is connected to the Latin libet, meaning 'it is pleasing'. The '-ed' ending is the ordinary English marker for the past tense and past participle, and because 'love' already ends in a silent 'e', writers simply add 'd' rather than doubling anything, which keeps the spelling pleasantly regular. The main trap is not the ending but the single 'v', since the word is never written with a double consonant despite the short vowel sound.

How the word is built

• love (root, from Old English lufu: affection)
• -ed (past tense / past participle / adjective suffix)

People who misspell loved also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got loved wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• the 42% of them got it wrong