Sled

How to spell sled

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sled

What does sled mean?

1. nounA small vehicle with runners or a smooth base, used for sliding over snow or ice.
2. verbTo ride on or be carried by a sled across snow or ice.

Sled in a sentence

• noun

  The children dragged a wooden sled up the snowy hill.

• verb

  The whole family went out to sled down the park slope after the storm.

• noun

  He loaded the firewood onto a heavy sled and pulled it across the ice.

• verb

  They like to sled across the frozen field every January.

Where does sled come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

This word came into English in the 1300s from Middle Dutch slede, which named a vehicle with runners for sliding over snow or ice. That Dutch word belonged to the same family as the verb 'slide' and the noun 'sledge', all built on a Germanic root meaning 'to slip or glide smoothly'. The link is easy to hear, since a sled is simply the thing that slides. English at first used it chiefly for heavy goods sledges and only later for the small recreational kind that children ride downhill. In American English 'sled' became the everyday term, while British speakers more often kept the longer relative 'sledge'. The plain four-letter spelling matches its short vowel and rarely gives trouble, the only real risk being to double the final 'd' before adding endings.

How the word is built

• sled (single root, from Middle Dutch slede: a sliding vehicle)