Painted

How to spell painted

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce painted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does painted mean?

1. verbPast tense of paint: applied colour to a surface, or produced a picture using colour.
2. adjectiveCovered with paint, or rendered in colour as a decorated surface or image.

Painted in a sentence

• verb

  We painted the fence over the long weekend.

• adjective

  A brightly painted wooden horse stood in the toy shop window.

• verb

  The artist painted the harbour at dawn.

• adjective

  The museum displayed a finely painted ceramic bowl.

Where does painted come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past tense and past participle of 'paint', a verb English took from Old French in the 1200s. The Old French form was 'peint', the past participle of 'peindre', meaning 'to paint' or 'to depict'. That French verb came in turn from the Latin 'pingere', which literally meant 'to paint, to embroider, or to decorate with colour'. The same Latin root survives in modern words such as 'picture', 'pigment', and 'depict', all carrying the idea of marking a surface with colour or image. The spelling stays straightforward because English simply adds the regular '-ed' ending to the stem, keeping the silent-friendly 'ai' vowel of 'paint' intact.

How the word is built

• paint (to apply colour)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)