Stung

How to spell stung

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stung

What does stung mean?

1. verbPast tense of sting: to have pierced or wounded with a sharp point, or to have caused a sharp pain or smart.

Stung in a sentence

• A wasp stung him on the back of the hand during lunch.

• The antiseptic stung for a moment before the cut started to heal.

Where does stung come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'sting', which descends from the Old English verb stingan, meaning 'to pierce, prick, or stab'. Old English belonged to a class of strong verbs that signalled their past tense by changing the inner vowel rather than adding an ending, the same pattern seen in sing, sang, sung and ring, rang, rung. For 'sting' the surviving forms collapsed into a single past form, 'stung', where the 'i' shifts to 'u'. The original sense covered any sharp piercing, whether by a thorn, a weapon, or an insect, and the insect sense gradually became the most familiar. Because the word follows the old strong pattern, the spelling trap is simply remembering 'u' rather than the present-tense 'i', and that 'ng' is never written 'ngue' or 'nge'.

How the word is built

• sting (Old English stingan: to pierce) with irregular vowel change marking the past tense, giving stung