Shocked

How to spell shocked

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shocked

What does shocked mean?

1. adjectiveFeeling sudden, strong surprise, distress, or disgust at something unexpected.
2. verbPast tense of shock: caused someone sudden surprise, distress, or a physical jolt.

Shocked in a sentence

• adjective

  She was shocked to learn the bank had closed her account without warning.

• verb

  The sudden price increase shocked many of the regular customers.

• adjective

  The whole office looked shocked when the redundancies were announced.

• verb

  The loose wire shocked the electrician when he touched the panel.

Where does shocked come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back to the verb 'shock', which entered English in the middle of the 1500s from the French 'choquer', meaning to clash or collide, originally describing two military forces crashing into one another. The deeper origin is uncertain but the term seems rooted in Germanic words for striking or knocking. From the sense of a violent physical collision, English speakers gradually extended 'shock' to mean any sudden jolt to the body or mind, including the medical and electrical senses we use today. The past form 'shocked' simply adds the regular '-ed' ending, and because the base ends in a hard 'ck' sound the spelling stays tidy: shock plus ed, with no doubling or dropping. The one trap is purely phonetic, since the final '-ed' is pronounced as a plain 't' sound, tempting some writers toward 'shockt'.

How the word is built

• shock (sudden blow or jolt)
• -ed (past tense / adjective suffix)