Stopped

How to spell stopped

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stopped

What does stopped mean?

1. verbPast tense of stop: ceased moving, acting, or operating, or brought something to a halt.

Stopped in a sentence

• The train stopped briefly at the small village station.

• She stopped the meeting when the figures did not add up.

Where does stopped come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base verb comes from Old English stoppian, meaning to plug or stuff up an opening, which itself goes back to a Late Latin word stuppare, to block with tow or oakum (the coarse fibre stuppa once used to caulk gaps). The earliest English sense was very physical: to close a hole, a bottle, or a passage so that nothing could pass. From that idea of blocking flow came the broader meaning of bringing movement or activity to a halt, which became dominant by the medieval period. The past tense is formed by the regular -ed rule, and because stop ends in a single vowel followed by a single consonant under stress, that final p is doubled before the ending. That doubling is the whole spelling trap: writers who hear one p sometimes write the single-p form, but the rule demands stopped, not the incorrect stoped.

How the word is built

• stop (root, from Old English stoppian: to plug or block)
• doubled p
• -ed (past tense suffix)