Swung

How to spell swung

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce swung

What does swung mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of swing: moved back and forth, or turned sharply, around a fixed point.

Swung in a sentence

• The heavy gate swung shut behind them with a loud clang.

• She swung the bat hard and missed the ball completely.

Where does swung come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'swing', which comes from the Old English swingan, meaning 'to beat, to scourge, or to fly about'. It belonged to a class of strong verbs that mark the past tense by changing the vowel inside the word rather than by tacking on an ending, the same pattern that gives us 'sing, sang, sung' and 'ring, rang, rung'. That is exactly why the present 'swing' becomes the past 'swung' with a -u- in the middle, and never the regular 'swinged'. The word has close cousins across the Germanic languages, including the German schwingen, meaning 'to swing or to vibrate'. The older sense of beating or flogging gradually softened over the centuries into the modern idea of moving freely back and forth, and from there into the looser senses of changing direction sharply or shifting an opinion or vote.

How the word is built

• sw-
• -u- (ablaut vowel from the Old English strong verb swingan)
• -ng; the past form of 'swing', made by an internal vowel change rather than by adding -ed