Stretched

How to spell stretched

9 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stretched

What does stretched mean?

1. verbPast tense of stretch: extended the body or a material to its full length, or pulled something tighter or longer.
2. adjectivePulled taut or extended; also describing resources or people pushed close to their limits.

Stretched in a sentence

• verb

  She stretched her arms above her head after the long flight.

• adjective

  The family budget felt badly stretched by the end of the month.

• verb

  The runner stretched his calves before the morning race.

• adjective

  With three projects running at once, the team was stretched thin.

Where does stretched come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base verb stretch descends from the Old English streccan, which meant 'to extend, spread out, or reach forth', and it belonged to the same West Germanic family that gave Dutch strekken and German strecken. The underlying sense was always one of pulling something longer or wider, whether a limb, a piece of cloth, or a span of land. The past form was originally irregular in older English but settled into the regular -ed pattern, giving stretched. The -tch spelling preserves the hard 'ch' sound that follows a short vowel, a pattern English also keeps in catch, match, and fetch. The whole word is native Germanic stock rather than a classical borrowing, which is why it feels so plain and old.

How the word is built

• stretch (to extend, from Old English streccan)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)