Scarred

How to spell scarred

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scarred

What does scarred mean?

1. adjectiveMarked by a scar or scars left from a healed wound, burn, or injury.
2. verbLeft a lasting mark on skin or a surface after a wound or damage healed.

Scarred in a sentence

• adjective

  His forearms were scarred from years of welding in the workshop.

• verb

  The deep cut scarred his cheek for the rest of his life.

• adjective

  The old table was scarred with deep scratches and burn marks.

• verb

  The fire scarred the brickwork along the entire back wall.

Where does scarred come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The base word 'scar' travelled into English in the late 1300s from Old French 'escare', meaning a scab or crust over a wound, which in turn came from Late Latin 'eschara'. That Latin term was borrowed from the Greek 'eskhara', whose literal meaning was 'hearth' or 'fireplace'; Greek physicians used it for the dark crust left on the skin by a burn, because it resembled the charred surface of a hearth. Over time the English sense settled on the permanent mark that remains after a wound heals, and later it stretched to figurative emotional damage. The form 'scarred' simply adds the past-tense and adjective ending '-ed', and because 'scar' ends in a single vowel followed by a single consonant, that final 'r' doubles before the suffix. That doubling is the heart of the spelling trap, and the single-r 'scared' (frightened) is an unrelated word with a different origin entirely.

How the word is built

• scar (mark left by a healed wound)
• -r- (doubled consonant before the suffix)
• -ed (past tense / adjective ending)