Scrambled

How to spell scrambled

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scrambled

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scrambled mean?

1. verbPast tense of scramble: moved quickly and clumsily, or mixed things together in a disordered way.
2. adjectiveBeaten and cooked in a soft mixed mass, or generally mixed up into disorder.

Scrambled in a sentence

• verb

  The hikers scrambled up the rocky slope before the storm arrived.

• adjective

  He ordered scrambled eggs and toast at the hotel breakfast.

• verb

  She scrambled to find her passport as the boarding call sounded.

• adjective

  The message arrived as a scrambled string of letters and numbers.

Where does scrambled come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Scramble first appears in English in the 1500s, but its exact origin is genuinely murky, which is why most dictionaries label it uncertain. It looks like a nasalised cousin of 'scrabble', the verb for clawing or scratching about, which itself came from the Dutch 'schrabbelen', a frequentative of 'schrabben' meaning 'to scratch'. The shared idea behind the whole family is rough, hurried, hand-over-hand movement, and from there English speakers stretched it to mean clambering up a slope, snatching at scattered things in a rush, and tumbling something into a confused mixture. The cookery sense, beating and stirring eggs into a soft jumble, grew naturally out of that 'mix it all up' meaning. The spelling keeps the full 'scr-' opening and the 'mbl' cluster of its likely Germanic relatives, so the past form simply tacks '-ed' onto the base.

How the word is built

• scramble (to clamber or mix hurriedly)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)