Mined

How to spell mined

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mined

What does mined mean?

1. verbPast tense of mine: dug coal, ore, or minerals out of the earth.
2. verbPast tense of mine: placed explosive charges in an area or stretch of water.

Mined in a sentence

• The valley was heavily mined for coal throughout the last century.

• The harbour was mined to stop enemy ships from entering.

• Gold was mined from the riverbed long before the railway arrived.

• Engineers had mined the bridge so it could be destroyed if needed.

Where does mined come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past form of the verb 'mine', which English took from the Old French 'miner', meaning 'to dig a tunnel' or 'to undermine', and the related noun 'mine' for an ore deposit or underground passage. The deeper root is uncertain but is widely traced to a Celtic or Gaulish source for a vein of metal in the ground, which is why the word sits a little apart from its tidy Latin neighbours. It arrived in English in the 1300s, at first carrying the military sense of digging beneath a wall or fortification to bring it down, before settling into its mineral-extraction meaning. The same digging idea later produced the explosive 'mine' buried in the ground or sea, so the verb covers both pulling ore out and laying charges. The spelling trap is purely aural: 'mined' sounds exactly like 'mind', and only the meaning of digging or extracting tells you to keep the silent link to 'mine'.

How the word is built

• mine (from Old French mine: an ore deposit or tunnel)
• -d (past tense and past participle ending)

Words that sound like mined

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• mind: The faculty of thought, memory, and consciousness; the seat of reasoning.