Polled

How to spell polled

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce polled

What does polled mean?

1. verbPast tense of poll: to have surveyed people for their opinions, or to have recorded or received votes.

Polled in a sentence

• The research firm polled two thousand voters before the election.

• The incumbent polled more votes than any rival candidate.

Where does polled come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the inflected form of the verb 'poll', which began life as a noun for the top or crown of the head, recorded in Middle English as 'polle' and closely related to Middle Dutch and Middle Low German words for the rounded top of something. Because counting a crowd often meant counting heads, 'poll' came to mean a tally of people, and from the sixteenth century onward it named the gathering and recording of votes. The verb 'to poll' therefore meant first to cut off the top (as in trimming hair or lopping a tree), then to register or count people one by one, and finally to canvass opinion. The same head-trimming sense survives in farming, where 'polled' livestock are animals that have no horns, as if the horns had been cropped from the top of the head. The double letters in 'polled' simply follow the regular rule for a short verb ending in a single vowel plus 'l', and the form is a true homophone of 'poled', which trips up writers who picture a pole rather than a head.

How the word is built

• poll (head, top of the head; hence a counting of heads)
• -ed (past tense / past participle / adjective suffix)