Skipped

How to spell skipped

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce skipped

What does skipped mean?

1. verbPassed over or deliberately left something out rather than dealing with it.
2. verbMoved along with light, bounding steps or hops.

Skipped in a sentence

• He skipped breakfast to catch the early train.

• The children skipped happily across the playground.

• The editor skipped two paragraphs that repeated the same point.

• She skipped down the garden path with her new rope.

Where does skipped come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The base verb skip first appears in Middle English around the 1300s, probably borrowed from a Scandinavian source related to Old Norse skopa, meaning to leap or run. From the start it carried the sense of moving along with light, bounding steps, and the related idea of darting quickly from one thing to another soon gave rise to the figurative meaning of passing over or leaving something out. The past tense skipped is formed by the regular -ed rule, but because the word ends in a short stressed vowel followed by a single consonant, that consonant is doubled, producing the double p. This same doubling rule explains spellings like stopped, dropped and trapped, and remembering the family helps fix why skipped is never written with one p. The double consonant keeps the vowel short: skiped would tempt a reader toward a long i, which is exactly what the doubling guards against.

How the word is built

• skip (root)
• -ed (past tense); the final p doubles before the suffix because skip ends in a single vowel plus a single consonant