Passed

How to spell passed

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce passed

What does passed mean?

1. verbThe past tense of 'pass': moved by, handed over, succeeded, or elapsed.

Passed in a sentence

• She passed the salt across the table to her father.

• He passed his driving test on the second attempt.

Where does passed come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'pass', which English took from the Old French 'passer', meaning 'to step, walk, or go by'. That French verb traces back to the Latin 'passus', literally a 'step' or 'pace', the same root that gives us 'pace' and 'passage'. The verb entered English in the 1200s and quickly spread into dozens of senses: moving past something, handing something over, succeeding at a test, and time elapsing. The spelling trap is purely auditory: 'passed' is pronounced identically to the unrelated word 'past', so writers must remember that the verb form carries the regular '-ed' ending. A useful memory hook is that any time you could say 'have passed', you need the verb with its '-ed'.

How the word is built

• pass (from Latin passus: step, pace)
• -ed (past tense suffix)

Words that sound like passed

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

• past: The time that has already happened, before the present moment.