Ridden

How to spell ridden

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ridden

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ridden mean?

1. verbThe past participle of 'ride': to have travelled on or been carried by a horse, vehicle, or other conveyance.
2. adjectiveOverwhelmed by, full of, or dominated by something unpleasant, usually paired with 'with' or used as a combining form.

Ridden in a sentence

• verb

  She had never ridden a motorbike before that summer.

• adjective

  The old cottage was ridden with damp and crumbling plaster.

• verb

  The trail horses had been ridden hard all morning.

• adjective

  The early software release was ridden with bugs.

Where does ridden come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of the verb 'ride', which descends from the Old English ridan, meaning 'to travel on horseback' or 'to be carried along'. The -en ending is the old strong-verb past participle marker, the same one that gives us 'driven', 'written', and 'broken', and it survives only in this fixed set of irregular verbs. The doubled 'd' appears because the short vowel of 'rid' is followed by the suffix, which is exactly the spot writers slip and leave a single 'd'. From the literal sense of having sat on a horse, the participle later broadened into a combining form meaning 'overwhelmed or dominated by', as in 'guilt-ridden' or 'debt-ridden', the idea being that the trouble rides on top of you. The word shares its Germanic roots with the Dutch rijden and German reiten, both still meaning 'to ride' today.

How the word is built

• rid- (from Old English ridan, to ride)
• -en (past participle suffix)