Stepped

How to spell stepped

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stepped

What does stepped mean?

1. verbMoved by lifting and setting down the foot, or took a single deliberate action toward something.
2. adjectiveFormed in a series of levels or stages, like a flight of steps.

Stepped in a sentence

• verb

  She stepped carefully over the puddle on her way to the office.

• adjective

  The garden was built on a stepped slope, with flowerbeds on each level.

• verb

  He stepped back to let the elderly passenger board first.

• adjective

  The architect designed a stepped facade that rose in clean tiers.

Where does stepped come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'step', which descends from the Old English noun 'stæpe' or 'steppe' meaning 'a footfall, a stair, or a pace', and the related verb 'steppan', 'to tread or walk'. The roots belong to the wider Germanic family, with cousins such as the Dutch 'stap' and German 'Stapfe', all carrying the idea of pressing the foot down firmly onto the ground. The original sense was very physical and concrete, simply placing one foot after another, and only later did figurative uses such as 'step into a role' or 'step down from a post' grow up around it. The spelling 'stepped' shows the regular English rule that a single short vowel followed by a single consonant doubles that consonant before -ed, which is why the second 'p' appears and why writers sometimes wrongly leave it out. The same doubling logic governs 'stopped', 'tapped', and 'shipped', so remembering one helps you remember the rest.

How the word is built

• step (root: to move the foot, from Old English stæpe)
• -ed (past tense suffix, with the single final consonant doubled to keep the short vowel)