Sold

How to spell sold

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sold

What does sold mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of 'sell': gave or transferred something to a buyer in exchange for money.

Sold in a sentence

• They sold their old car to a neighbour for a fair price.

• The gallery sold every painting before the exhibition closed.

Where does sold come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'sell', which comes from the Old English sellan, meaning 'to give' or 'to hand over'. In its earliest use the word did not necessarily involve money at all; it simply meant to give something up or deliver it to another person, and the commercial sense of exchanging goods for payment grew out of that broader idea. The Old English past form was sealde, which over the centuries smoothed into the modern 'sold', losing the awkward middle sounds while keeping the irregular vowel change instead of a tidy -ed ending. The same Germanic root survives in related northern European languages, where words for giving and handing over still resemble it. Because the verb is irregular, learners write 'sold' rather than the expected 'selled', and the single trap is that it sounds exactly like 'soled', the word for a shoe fitted with a sole.

How the word is built

• irregular past tense and past participle of 'sell' (Old English sellan), formed by vowel change rather than by adding a regular -ed ending