Ripped

How to spell ripped

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ripped

What does ripped mean?

1. verbPast tense of rip: to have torn something apart roughly or quickly.
2. adjectiveInformal: having very lean, clearly defined muscles.

Ripped in a sentence

• verb

  The courier handed me a parcel that had been ripped open in transit.

• adjective

  After a year of training he looked seriously ripped in his swimming photos.

• verb

  He ripped the old wallpaper off the bedroom walls in an afternoon.

• adjective

  The actor got noticeably ripped for the role within three months.

Where does ripped come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base verb 'rip' first appears in English in the 1400s, meaning to tear or cut something open quickly and roughly. Its exact parentage is genuinely murky, but it is usually linked to the Low German and Flemish 'rippen', meaning to tear or pull at, and it sits alongside the Old Norse and Scandinavian family of words for rough pulling. The form 'ripped' is simply the past tense and past participle, and because the verb ends in a single vowel followed by a single consonant, the spelling doubles the 'p' before the '-ed' ending; that doubling is the small trap, since the word is heard as a clean 'ript' sound. From the eighteenth century onward 'rip' also spread into figurative uses, such as moving with sudden speed, and in modern slang 'ripped' came to describe a body so lean that the muscles look as if they have been carved out. The single-syllable bluntness of the word has kept it useful and informal across all these meanings.

How the word is built

• rip (to tear)
• -ped (doubled p
• -ed past tense / participle)