Steamed

How to spell steamed

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce steamed

What does steamed mean?

1. adjectiveCooked or softened by the action of hot water vapour rather than by boiling or frying.
2. verbPast tense of steam: gave off vapour, or cooked or treated something using hot vapour.
3. adjectiveInformal term for being very annoyed or angry about something.

Steamed in a sentence

• adjective

  The menu offered grilled chicken with steamed vegetables.

• verb

  The kettle steamed on the stove until she switched it off.

• adjective

  She was steamed about the late delivery and called to complain.

• adjective

  A bowl of steamed rice came with every main course.

• verb

  He steamed the shirt to remove the creases before the meeting.

• adjective

  The customers were steamed when the refund was refused.

Where does steamed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word steam descends from the Old English steam, which meant a vapour, an exhalation, or a hot rising mist, and it has close cousins in the Dutch stoom and other West Germanic tongues. For most of its early life it simply named the visible cloud given off by anything hot or breathing, and only with the rise of engines in the 1600s and 1700s did it gain its powerful association with pressurised water vapour driving machinery. The cooking sense, food softened over boiling water, and the figurative sense of being heated with anger both grew out of that same image of hot vapour. The form steamed is the regular past tense and past participle, made simply by adding -ed, and it doubles as an adjective describing food prepared this way. Because the root keeps its plain ea spelling and adds a tidy -ed, the word holds few surprises, though the silent smoothing of the ending into a single -d sound can briefly mislead a careless writer.

How the word is built

• steam (Old English steam: vapour, hot mist)
• -ed (past tense / adjectival suffix)