Saddest

How to spell saddest

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce saddest

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does saddest mean?

1. adjectiveMost unhappy, sorrowful, or causing the greatest sorrow of all those compared.

Saddest in a sentence

• The saddest part of moving away was leaving her old neighbours behind.

• Losing the family pet was the saddest day of the whole year.

Where does saddest come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the superlative form of the adjective 'sad', a word with deep Germanic roots that reaches English through Old English 'sæd'. The original meaning was surprisingly different from today: 'sæd' meant 'full', 'satisfied', or 'weary', and it shares an ancestor with the Latin 'satis', meaning 'enough', the same root that gives us 'satisfy' and 'saturate'. Over the medieval period the sense drifted from 'sated' to 'settled' or 'steadfast', then to 'serious' or 'grave', and finally to the modern emotional sense of 'unhappy' by the late Middle Ages. The superlative is formed with the ordinary '-est' ending, and because 'sad' ends in a single vowel plus a single consonant, that final 'd' is doubled before the suffix, which is the only real spelling point to remember.

How the word is built

• sad (root adjective)
• -est (superlative suffix, with the final consonant doubled to keep the short vowel)