Mashed

How to spell mashed

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mashed

What does mashed mean?

1. verbCrushed a soft food into a smooth or pulpy mass.
2. adjectiveReduced to a soft pulp by crushing, as a food.

Mashed in a sentence

• verb

  She mashed the bananas before stirring them into the cake batter.

• adjective

  The roast came with a generous scoop of mashed potato.

• verb

  He mashed the boiled potatoes with butter and a little warm milk.

• adjective

  The toddler happily ate a bowl of mashed carrot and peas.

Where does mashed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word mash comes from Old English masc or max, a term tied to brewing that meant a mixture of crushed malt steeped in hot water. That sense survives today in the mash that brewers and distillers still prepare. The deeper root is Germanic, related to words across the old northern languages for a soft, mixed pulp, and it likely shares an ancestor with the word for a mesh or mixture. Over time the verb broadened from the brewhouse to mean crushing any soft food into a pulp, such as potatoes or fruit. The form mashed simply adds the regular past tense and participle ending -ed, which keeps the spelling straightforward since the base never changes.

How the word is built

• mash (to crush soft)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)