Shrugged

How to spell shrugged

8 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shrugged

What does shrugged mean?

1. verbRaised and lowered the shoulders to express indifference, doubt, or lack of concern (past tense).

Shrugged in a sentence

• When asked who left the dishes in the sink, he simply shrugged and walked off.

• She shrugged at the bad news and decided not to worry about it.

Where does shrugged come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is the past tense of the verb 'shrug', a word whose origins are genuinely murky. It first appears in English around the late 1400s as 'schurgge', meaning to raise and contract the shoulders, often to show indifference or doubt. Scholars suspect a Scandinavian root, since dialect words in the Nordic languages describe shivering or hunching, but no single ancestor has been pinned down with certainty. The spelling trap in the past tense comes from a simple rule: a short, stressed single-syllable verb ending in one vowel plus one consonant doubles that consonant before '-ed', so 'shrug' becomes 'shrugged' rather than 'shruged'. The same doubling logic shapes 'hugged', 'dragged', and 'tugged', which is a useful family to remember when the spelling feels uncertain.

How the word is built

• shrug (raise the shoulders)
• -g- (doubled consonant)
• -ed (past tense suffix)