Strewn

How to spell strewn

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce strewn

What does strewn mean?

1. verbPast participle of strew: scattered or spread loosely over a surface.

Strewn in a sentence

• The office floor was strewn with crumpled paper after the late shift.

• Broken glass lay strewn across the motorway after the collision.

Where does strewn come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Strewn is the past participle of the verb strew, which descends from the Old English streowian or strewian, meaning 'to scatter' or 'to spread loosely about'. The word belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close cousins in the Dutch strooien and the German streuen, all carrying the sense of spreading things over a surface. The root reaches even further back to an ancient idea of 'spreading out flat', a notion that also surfaces in the Latin sternere, 'to spread or strew', the ultimate ancestor of English words like 'stratum' and 'street' (literally a 'paved, spread-out way'). Old English had several strong-verb participle forms ending in -n, and strewn preserves that old pattern, which is why it keeps the silent-looking 'w' before the 'n' rather than following the regular '-ed' route. The spelling trap is the 'ewn' cluster: the 'ew' makes the long 'oo' sound while the 'w' stays silent against the 'n', so writers must remember the letter is there at all.

How the word is built

• strew (Old English streowian: to scatter)
• -n (past participle ending)