Penned

How to spell penned

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce penned

What does penned mean?

1. verbWrote or composed something, especially by hand.
2. verbShut animals into a small enclosure or fold.

Penned in a sentence

• She penned a heartfelt letter to her grandmother over the weekend.

• The farmer penned the sheep in the lower field before the storm.

• The novelist penned the final chapter in a single sitting.

• They penned the goats overnight to keep them safe from foxes.

Where does penned come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of the verb 'pen', and English actually carries two separate verbs spelled this way, which is why the meaning splits cleanly in two. The writing sense traces to the Latin penna, meaning 'feather', because the earliest pens were sharpened quills cut from large bird feathers; that word travelled through Old French 'penne' into Middle English around the 1300s and gave us the instrument and then the act of writing with it. The enclosing sense comes instead from the Old English 'penn', meaning a fold or coop for animals, a native Germanic word unrelated to the Latin feather. Both verbs double the final 'n' before the '-ed' ending because the base word is a short single syllable closing on a single consonant after a single vowel, the standard doubling rule that also gives us 'planned' and 'banned'. The single 'n' of the base and the doubled 'nn' of the past tense are the spelling point worth fixing in memory.

How the word is built

• pen (root)
• -ned (doubled consonant
• -ed past tense)