Moved

How to spell moved

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce moved

What does moved mean?

1. verbPast tense of move: changed position, or transferred from one place to another.
2. adjectiveEmotionally affected or stirred by something.

Moved in a sentence

• verb

  They moved the sofa closer to the window.

• adjective

  The audience was deeply moved by the speech.

• verb

  The family moved to a larger house last spring.

• adjective

  He felt genuinely moved when he read the letter.

Where does moved come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of 'move', which came into English in the 1200s through the Anglo-Norman and Old French verb 'moveir', itself descended from the Latin 'movere', meaning 'to set in motion, stir, or shift'. The Latin root carried both the literal sense of physical motion and the figurative sense of stirring someone's feelings, and English inherited both strands; that is why a person can be 'moved' across a room or 'moved' to tears. The same 'movere' root underlies a large family of everyday words such as 'motion', 'motor', 'remove', and 'emotion', all built on the idea of stirring or shifting. When the regular '-ed' ending is added, the spelling is wholly predictable: the silent final 'e' of 'move' simply drops before the ending, giving 'moved' rather than 'moveed'. Because that pattern is so familiar to fluent adults, the word rarely causes spelling trouble.

How the word is built

• move (root, from Latin movere 'to move')
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)