Ranged

How to spell ranged

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ranged

What does ranged mean?

1. verbVaried between specified upper and lower limits.
2. verbMoved or wandered freely over a wide area.

Ranged in a sentence

• The ticket prices ranged from twenty to eighty pounds.

• The cattle ranged freely across the open pasture all summer.

• The test scores ranged from forty to ninety percent across the class.

• Her lecture ranged broadly across history, art, and economics.

Where does ranged come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past tense of the verb range, which English took from Old French in the 1200s. The Old French verb rangier meant 'to set in a row or line', and it was built on the noun renc or ranc, meaning 'row, line, or rank'. That noun was itself borrowed into French from a Germanic, Frankish word related to *hring, the ancestor of the modern English 'ring', so the underlying idea was things arranged in a curved or ordered line. From the sense of arranging in order, range broadened to mean wandering over a stretch of ground (as cattle do) and then to the abstract idea of varying between two limits, which is the most common modern use. The silent final 'e' of range is kept in pronunciation by softening the 'g', and when the -ed is added it simply absorbs that 'e', leaving 'ranged'.

How the word is built

• range (row, line, extent)
• -ed (past tense suffix)