Slept

How to spell slept

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce slept

What does slept mean?

1. verbPast tense of sleep: rested in a state of sleep.

Slept in a sentence

• The baby finally slept through the whole night.

• After the long flight she slept for nearly twelve hours.

Where does slept come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Slept is the past tense of sleep, which comes from the Old English verb slǣpan, meaning 'to rest in a state of sleep'. That verb belonged to a broad family of Germanic words for sleeping, with close relatives such as Dutch slapen and German schlafen, all tracing back to a root that also carried the idea of being slack or limp, the way a body goes loose in rest. The past form was originally something like slǣpte, but over the centuries the long vowel shortened and the ending settled into the spelling slept, with a single 'e' rather than the 'ee' of sleep. This short-vowel spelling is the small trap: the present tense doubles the 'e' (sleep) while the past tense drops to one (slept). The same vowel-shortening pattern shows up in pairs like keep and kept, sweep and swept, and feel and felt.

How the word is built

• sleep (Old English slǣpan: to rest in sleep) with vowel change to mark past tense
• -t (past ending)