Plucked

How to spell plucked

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce plucked

What does plucked mean?

1. verbPulled or picked something off sharply, or pulled a string to make it sound.

Plucked in a sentence

• She plucked the ripe apples from the lower branches.

• The guitarist plucked each string to check the tuning.

Where does plucked come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'pluck', which descends from the Old English ploccian or pluccian, meaning 'to pull off' or 'to pick'. The word belongs to a wider family of Germanic forms, including the Dutch plukken and the German pflücken, all carrying the sense of pulling something away with a quick tug. Scholars believe these forms may ultimately trace back to a Late Latin verb piluccare, meaning 'to pull out hair', which is built on pilus, the Latin word for 'a hair'. That older link to pulling out hair survives neatly in modern uses like plucking feathers or plucking eyebrows. The spelling trap is simple but real: the silent, hard ending sounds like 't', so writers must remember the regular '-ed' suffix that gives 'plucked' rather than the tempting but wrong 'pluckt'.

How the word is built

• pluck (to pull or pick off sharply)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)