Spiked

How to spell spiked

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce spiked

What does spiked mean?

1. verbPast tense of spike: pierced, secretly added a substance to a drink, or rose sharply.
2. adjectiveFitted with sharp points, or having a sudden sharp increase.

Spiked in a sentence

• verb

  Someone spiked the punch with vodka at the party.

• adjective

  The runner wore spiked shoes for better grip on the track.

• verb

  Demand for flights spiked over the holiday weekend.

• adjective

  The wall was topped with a spiked metal railing.

Where does spiked come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past form of the verb 'spike', which grew out of the Middle English noun 'spike' meaning a sharp point, a large nail, or a pointed ear of grain. The roots are tangled but Germanic: scholars connect it to Old Norse 'spik' and Middle Dutch and Low German 'spiker', all words for a nail or sharp wooden point, while the grain sense leans on Latin 'spica', meaning an ear of corn. By the 1600s the noun had become a verb meaning to fasten or pierce with a spike, and from there the figurative uses bloomed: to 'spike' a cannon meant to drive a nail into its touch-hole to disable it, which is why we still 'spike' a story to kill it. The drinks sense, secretly adding alcohol or a drug, is a twentieth-century extension, and the 'sharp rise' sense comes from the pointed shape a line makes on a graph. Because the word ends in a hard 'k' sound, the past tense takes a 't'-sounding '-ed', yet it is still spelled '-ked', which is the only small thing a writer has to remember.

How the word is built

• spike (sharp point/nail)
• -ed (past tense / adjective suffix)