Slashed

How to spell slashed

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce slashed

What does slashed mean?

1. verbCut something with a violent sweeping stroke.
2. verbReduced an amount, such as a price or budget, sharply and dramatically.

Slashed in a sentence

• The vandal slashed the tyres on every car in the street.

• The retailer slashed prices across the whole store before closing down.

• A low branch slashed his arm as he pushed through the hedge.

• The council slashed the budget for road repairs this year.

Where does slashed come from?

Language of origin: French

The base verb 'slash' first appears in English in the late 1300s, and its exact parentage is genuinely uncertain. The most widely accepted suggestion links it to the Old French verb 'esclachier', meaning 'to break' or 'to smash', though some scholars treat the word as simply imitative, an echo of the swishing, cutting sound a blade makes through the air. From its earliest use it carried the idea of striking violently with a long sweeping stroke, and by the 1500s it had also gained the tailoring sense of cutting decorative slits into a garment to show the fabric beneath. The modern figurative meaning, to reduce something such as prices or budgets sharply and dramatically, grew out of that same image of a single forceful cut. The spelling is wholly regular: take the verb 'slash' and add the ordinary past ending '-ed', which is pronounced as a simple 't' sound here even though it is written with a 'd'.

How the word is built

• slash (to cut with sweeping strokes)
• -ed (past tense / past participle)