Rewritten

How to spell rewritten

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce rewritten

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rewritten mean?

1. verbPast participle of rewrite: composed or set down again in a different or corrected form.

Rewritten in a sentence

• The whole contract had to be rewritten after the lawyers flagged two clauses.

• His manager said the proposal must be rewritten before the deadline.

Where does rewritten come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of 'rewrite', formed by attaching the prefix 're-', meaning 'again' or 'back', to 'write'. The verb 'write' descends from Old English 'writan', which originally meant to scratch, score, or carve, since early writing was incised into wood or stone before ink and parchment took over. Its past participle 'written' developed through the strong verb pattern that also gave English 'ride/ridden' and 'bite/bitten', which explains the double 't' and the '-en' ending. The 're-' prefix arrived from Latin by way of French and was bolted onto many native verbs to signal repetition. So 'rewritten' simply means written over again, and the spelling trap lies in remembering the doubled 't' inherited from 'written'.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• written (past participle of write, from Old English writan)