Spanned

How to spell spanned

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce spanned

What does spanned mean?

1. verbExtended across a distance, a period of time, or a range of things.

Spanned in a sentence

• The old stone bridge spanned the river for over two hundred years.

• Her career in journalism spanned four decades.

Where does spanned come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'span', which traces back to the Old English noun 'spann', a measure equal to the distance between the tip of the thumb and the tip of the little finger when the hand is stretched wide. The word is rooted in the idea of stretching or reaching across, and it has close cousins in the Dutch 'span' and the German 'Spanne', all carrying the sense of a stretched span of the hand. Over time the noun gave rise to a verb meaning 'to extend across' or 'to bridge', so a bridge could be said to span a river. The spelling trap appears only when the verb is inflected: because 'span' ends in a single short vowel followed by a single consonant, that final n doubles before -ed, giving 'spanned' rather than 'spaned'. The same doubling rule shapes related forms such as 'planned' and 'scanned'.

How the word is built

• span (Old English root meaning to stretch or reach across)
• -n- (doubled consonant)
• -ed (past tense suffix)