Sailed

How to spell sailed

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sailed

What does sailed mean?

1. verbTravelled across water in a boat or ship, especially one moving under wind power, or moved smoothly and easily.

Sailed in a sentence

• The ferry sailed out of the harbour just before dawn.

• They sailed along the coast for three days before reaching the island.

Where does sailed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of 'sail', which descends from the Old English noun 'segl', meaning a sheet of cloth spread to catch the wind, and the related verb 'seglian', 'to travel on water by means of sails'. The word belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close cousins in Dutch 'zeil' and German 'Segel', all pointing back to a common ancestor describing a piece of fabric rigged to a mast. Over the centuries the meaning broadened from literally moving a sailing ship to any smooth gliding or effortless passage, as in someone who 'sailed' through an exam. The past tense simply adds the regular '-ed' ending, and the spelling trap lies in the 'ai' vowel pairing, which sounds the same as the unrelated word 'sale'. Keeping the 'i' in 'sailed' is what marks it as the wind-and-water word rather than a transaction.

How the word is built

• sail (root: to travel by water under canvas)
• -ed (past tense suffix)