Roasted

How to spell roasted

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce roasted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does roasted mean?

1. adjectiveCooked by prolonged exposure to dry heat in an oven or over a fire.
2. verbPast tense of roast: cooked food by dry heat in an oven or over a flame.
3. verbPast tense of roast in its informal sense: harshly mocked or ridiculed someone, often in good humour.

Roasted in a sentence

• adjective

  The menu featured roasted lamb with rosemary potatoes.

• verb

  He roasted the turkey for nearly four hours on Sunday.

• verb

  His colleagues roasted him good-naturedly about his terrible parking.

• adjective

  She served a plate of roasted vegetables alongside the chicken.

• verb

  We roasted chestnuts over the open fire last winter.

• verb

  The critics roasted the new film for its weak plot.

Where does roasted come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back to the Old French verb rostir, meaning 'to cook meat by exposing it to direct heat', which English borrowed in the late 1200s and quickly turned into 'roast'. The Old French form itself came from a Germanic root preserved in words like the Dutch roosten and the German rosten, both connected to a 'grid' or 'gridiron' on which food was grilled. From the literal cooking sense English layered on figurative uses: coffee beans and nuts came to be 'roasted', and by the modern era the word picked up a playful slang sense of subjecting someone to a barrage of mocking criticism. The form 'roasted' is simply the regular past tense and past participle, made by adding -ed, and it doubles as an adjective describing food that has been cooked this way. The spelling trap is the 'oa' digraph for the long o sound, which writers sometimes reduce to a single 'o'.

How the word is built

• roast (from Old French rostir, to cook over a fire)
• -ed (past tense / past participle / adjective suffix)