Scrapped

How to spell scrapped

8 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scrapped

What does scrapped mean?

1. verbDiscarded as useless, or cancelled and abandoned before completion.
2. verbHad a fight or noisy quarrel, in informal usage.

Scrapped in a sentence

• The council scrapped the parking plan after months of complaints.

• The two brothers scrapped over the last slice of pizza.

• The factory scrapped the old machines and bought new ones.

• The boys scrapped in the playground until a teacher stepped in.

Where does scrapped come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is the past tense of the verb 'scrap', which grew out of the noun 'scrap' meaning a small fragment or leftover piece. English took 'scrap' from the Old Norse word 'skrap', which referred to trifles, odds and ends, and bits of scrapped metal, and which is linked to the verb 'skrapa', meaning 'to scrape'. By the late 1800s the noun had spawned a verb meaning to consign something to the scrap heap, that is, to discard or abandon it as no longer useful. A separate informal sense, meaning to have a fight or quarrel, also appeared around the same period, probably from the same notion of a rough scrappy scuffle. The doubled 'p' is the spelling trap here: because 'scrap' ends in a single vowel plus a single consonant, the consonant doubles before '-ed', which is exactly what keeps 'scrapped' distinct from the unrelated 'scraped', the past tense of 'scrape'.

How the word is built

• scrap (from Old Norse skrap: odds and ends, fragments)
• -p- (doubled consonant)
• -ed (past tense)