Shamed

How to spell shamed

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shamed

What does shamed mean?

1. verbMade someone feel guilty, humiliated, or disgraced, often publicly.
2. adjectiveFeeling or showing a painful sense of guilt or disgrace.

Shamed in a sentence

• verb

  The newspaper shamed the politician over his expenses.

• adjective

  He looked shamed as he admitted he had forgotten the appointment.

• verb

  She felt shamed by her own careless mistake at the meeting.

• adjective

  The shamed expression on her face told everyone she regretted the remark.

Where does shamed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'shame', which descends from the Old English noun sceamu (also spelled scamu), meaning 'a painful feeling of guilt, disgrace, or modesty'. The same root produced a verb, sceamian, 'to feel shame' or 'to cause shame in another', and that double sense of feeling it yourself and inflicting it on someone else still survives today. The word has solid Germanic roots, with close relatives such as the German Scham 'modesty' and schämen 'to be ashamed', and the ancestral sense may have carried the idea of covering or hiding oneself out of embarrassment. By the medieval period the verb was firmly established in English, and the regular past form added the familiar -ed ending. The single 'm' is the spelling point to watch: the silent 'e' of 'shame' is dropped before -ed, but the consonant is never doubled, so it is 'shamed', not 'shammed'.

How the word is built

• shame (from Old English sceamu: disgrace, feeling of guilt)
• -ed (past tense and participle suffix)