Scratched

How to spell scratched

9 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scratched

What does scratched mean?

1. verbPast tense of scratch: marked, scraped, or rubbed a surface, often leaving a thin line or relieving an itch.

Scratched in a sentence

• The cat scratched the leg of the new sofa.

• He scratched his arm on a rusty nail in the shed.

Where does scratched come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base verb scratch appears in late Middle English, around the 1400s, and seems to be a blend of two earlier words that both meant to claw or scrape: scratten and cratchen. Those forms have Germanic roots, with relatives in Middle Dutch cratsen and Middle Low German kratzen, all carrying the sense of dragging nails or claws across a surface. The vivid, harsh sound of the cluster scr- helped the word stick, since it imitates the rasping action it names. The past form scratched is simply the regular verb plus the -ed ending, and the only spelling trap is that the final -tched is pronounced as a single t sound, so the silent t and the h are easy to drop. The word has carried steady, concrete meanings ever since, from marking a surface to withdrawing from a race.

How the word is built

• scratch (verb, to scrape with claws or nails)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)