Oiled

How to spell oiled

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce oiled

What does oiled mean?

1. verbApplied oil to something to lubricate, treat, or protect it.
2. adjectiveCoated, treated, or lubricated with oil.

Oiled in a sentence

• verb

  She oiled the squeaky door hinge until it stopped creaking.

• adjective

  The well oiled machinery ran smoothly through the night shift.

• verb

  He oiled the cricket bat carefully before the new season.

• adjective

  The freshly oiled floorboards gleamed under the lights.

Where does oiled come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past form of the verb 'oil', which traces back through Old French 'oile' or 'uile' to the Latin 'oleum', meaning 'olive oil'. The Latin word in turn came from the Greek 'elaion', the oil pressed from the 'elaia', or olive tree, since for the ancient Mediterranean world oil meant olive oil almost exclusively. When the word reached English in the 1100s and 1200s it still carried that olive sense, only later widening to cover any greasy or lubricating liquid, including the mineral oils of the modern age. The same 'oleum' root survives in words such as 'petroleum' (literally 'rock oil') and 'oleaginous'. For the speller, the trap is the vowel: the sound is written 'oi', and the verb simply takes a regular '-ed', giving 'oiled'.

How the word is built

• oil (from Latin oleum: olive oil)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)