Parked

How to spell parked

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce parked

What does parked mean?

1. verbPast tense of park: brought a vehicle to a stop and left it in a particular place.
2. verbPast tense of park used figuratively: set an issue or task aside to deal with later.

Parked in a sentence

• She parked the car directly outside the office.

• The team parked the pricing question until the next meeting.

• He parked the van in the loading bay before unloading the stock.

• Management parked the proposal pending further budget approval.

Where does parked come from?

Language of origin: French

The base word park entered English in the 1200s from the Old French parc, meaning an enclosed tract of land kept for hunting or grazing, which in turn traces back to a Medieval Latin word parricus for a fenced enclosure. For centuries a park was simply a bounded green space, and only in the early twentieth century, with the rise of the motor car, did the verb 'to park' come to mean leaving a vehicle stationary in a chosen spot. The past tense form parked carries the regular English -ed ending, so the spelling is entirely predictable once you hear the hard final sound. That final sound is voiceless and lands as a crisp 't', which is the small trap: the ending is still written -ed even though it is pronounced like 't'. The same enclosure root survives in modern words such as parking, paddock (a related dialect form), and the proper noun Hyde Park.

How the word is built

• park (an enclosed ground, later a place to leave a vehicle)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)