Sculpted

How to spell sculpted

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sculpted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sculpted mean?

1. verbShaped a hard material such as stone, clay, or metal into a figure or form by carving or modelling.
2. adjectiveHaving a clearly shaped, well-defined form, as if carved.

Sculpted in a sentence

• verb

  The artist sculpted a horse from a single block of marble.

• adjective

  The gym left him with a lean, sculpted physique.

• verb

  Over many evenings she sculpted the clay into a delicate bust.

• adjective

  The dress had a sculpted neckline that followed every curve.

Where does sculpted come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of the verb 'sculpt', which traces back to the Latin verb sculpere, meaning 'to carve' or 'to cut out'. From that verb the Romans formed sculptor, the carver, and sculptura, the act of carving, both of which entered English through French and Latin scholarship well before the verb itself existed. Curiously, English had the nouns 'sculptor' and 'sculpture' for centuries before anyone needed a plain verb, so 'sculpt' is a back-formation: writers simply trimmed the noun down to a verb in the early nineteenth century. The buried 'p' in the spelling is a direct fossil of that Latin sculpere, and because the 'p' is barely heard between the 'l' and the 't', it is exactly the letter people forget. Keeping the Latin carving root in mind is the surest way to remember that 'sculpted' has both a 'p' and a 't' before the ending.

How the word is built

• sculpt (from Latin sculpere: to carve)
• -ed (past tense / participle suffix)