Piled

How to spell piled

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce piled

What does piled mean?

1. verbStacked, heaped, or gathered things into a mound, in the past.

Piled in a sentence

• The laundry piled up while she was away on holiday.

• He piled the dishes high in the sink before the weekend.

Where does piled come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of the verb 'pile', which traces back to the Latin pila, meaning a 'pillar', 'pier', or 'stone mound'. English took the word through Old French pile, and over time the sense drifted from a built-up column of stone to any heap of stacked objects. By the late medieval period 'pile' was firmly established as both a noun for a heap and a verb for the act of stacking. The spelling is straightforward: the silent final 'e' of 'pile' is dropped before the regular '-ed' ending, leaving 'piled'. The same pila root also gave English 'pillar' and the architectural 'pile' that means a heavy support driven into the ground.

How the word is built

• pile (heap)
• -ed (past tense suffix)