Scorched

How to spell scorched

8 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scorched

What does scorched mean?

1. adjectiveBurned, browned, or dried out by intense heat or fire.
2. verbBurned, browned, or dried something with heat (past tense of scorch).

Scorched in a sentence

• adjective

  The scorched grass crunched underfoot after the long drought.

• verb

  She left the iron face down and it scorched the collar of the blouse.

• adjective

  A faint smell rose from the scorched edge of the ironed shirt.

• verb

  The relentless summer sun scorched the lawn to a pale brown.

Where does scorched come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The base verb scorch surfaced in Middle English in the 1300s with the sense of burning a surface or singeing it, and its exact origin is genuinely murky. The most favoured explanation traces it to Old Norse, comparing skorpna, meaning 'to be shrivelled up by heat', and skorpinn, meaning 'shrivelled', which fits the idea of skin or grass drying and curling under fire. A rival theory links it to the Old French escorchier, meaning 'to strip off the skin' or 'to flay', from a Late Latin root excorticare ('to remove the bark'), and the two ideas may well have blended in English usage. By Shakespeare's day scorch firmly meant to burn slightly or to dry up with heat, and the -ed ending simply marks the past tense and the adjective form. Because the sound is a clean 'cht', the only real spelling hazard is remembering the silent-looking 'ch' cluster rather than writing a plain 't'.

How the word is built

• scorch (to burn the surface of)
• -ed (past tense / past participle / adjective suffix)