Sought

How to spell sought

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sought

What does sought mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of 'seek': searched for, tried to find, or attempted to obtain something.

Sought in a sentence

• The family sought legal advice before signing the contract.

• Investigators sought fresh evidence to reopen the case.

Where does sought come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'seek', and it descends directly from Old English. The present-tense verb was sēcan, meaning 'to look for' or 'to try to obtain', while its past form was sōhte, the direct ancestor of modern 'sought'. The verb belongs to the West Germanic family, with close relatives in Dutch zoeken and German suchen, all carrying the sense of searching. The irregular pairing of seek and sought survived the centuries because it was so common in everyday speech, even as English regularised most other verbs into a simple '-ed' past. The spelling trap is that the modern pronunciation no longer matches the letters: the 'gh' is a fossil from a once-pronounced throaty sound that vanished, leaving 'ough' to spell a plain 'aw' vowel, which is why writers are tempted to misspell it as 'sort' or 'saught'.

How the word is built

• sought (irregular past tense and past participle of 'seek', from Old English sōhte)