Pitted

How to spell pitted

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pitted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pitted mean?

1. adjectiveCovered with small hollows, dents, or scars in the surface.
2. verbRemoved the stone or pit from a fruit such as a cherry, olive, or date.
3. verbSet someone or something in direct competition or conflict against another.

Pitted in a sentence

• adjective

  Years of frost had left the road badly pitted.

• verb

  She pitted a bowl of cherries before starting the jam.

• verb

  The inheritance dispute pitted brother against brother.

• adjective

  The antique mirror was pitted with tiny spots of corrosion.

• verb

  The chef pitted the olives by hand for the tapenade.

• verb

  The final round pitted the reigning champion against an unknown challenger.

Where does pitted come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past and adjectival form of the verb 'pit', which traces back to the Old English noun 'pytt', meaning a hole, a well, or a hollow dug in the ground. That Old English word was itself an early borrowing from the Latin 'puteus', which meant a well or a pit, so the idea of a dug-out hollow has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years. From the literal hole in the ground, English speakers extended 'pit' to small surface depressions, such as the marks left by smallpox or corrosion, and then to the verb 'to pit', meaning to mark with such hollows. A separate strand gave us 'pit one against another', drawn from the old pits where animals or fighters were set to contend. The spelling trap is simple but persistent: because 'pit' ends in a single short-vowel consonant, the t doubles before the ending, giving 'pitted' rather than the wrong 'pited'.

How the word is built

• pit (a hole or hollow, from Old English pytt)
• -ed (past tense / adjective suffix, with the final t doubled before -ed)