Owed

How to spell owed

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce owed

What does owed mean?

1. verbWas obliged to pay or repay money or a debt to someone.

Owed in a sentence

• After the holiday he owed the credit card company several hundred pounds.

• The tenant owed three months of back rent before the eviction notice arrived.

Where does owed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'owe', which descends from the Old English verb agan, meaning 'to have' or 'to possess'. In its earliest use the word was about ownership rather than debt: if you owed something, you simply had it or held it as your own. Over the medieval period the sense shifted from 'to possess' to 'to possess on the obligation of giving back', and from there to the modern meaning of being in debt or being bound to pay. The same Old English root also gave us the modern words 'own' and 'ought', all three sharing the idea of holding or being bound to something. The spelling trap is the silent finish: the vowel sounds like a long 'o', yet the word ends in '-wed', making it a perfect homophone of the poem called an 'ode'.

How the word is built

• owe (from Old English agan: to have, to possess)
• -ed (past tense suffix)

Words that sound like owed

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

• ode: A lyric poem, usually formal in tone, written in praise of or addressed to a particular subject.