Tailed

How to spell tailed

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tailed

What does tailed mean?

1. verbFollowed someone closely and secretly in order to watch where they went.
2. adjectiveHaving a tail of a particular kind, used in compounds describing animals or shapes.

Tailed in a sentence

• verb

  The detective tailed the suspect across the city for three days.

• adjective

  The ring-tailed lemur is easy to spot among the other primates.

• verb

  Two unmarked cars tailed the courier from the airport.

• adjective

  A forked-tailed kite circled high above the field.

Where does tailed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is the inflected form of 'tail', which descends from the Old English 'taegl' or 'taegel', meaning the hindmost growth on an animal's body. That Old English noun goes back to a Germanic root that some scholars connect to ideas of a hairy tuft or a brush of hair, which fits its earliest use for an animal's hindquarters. Over the centuries the noun grew a verb sense, 'to follow closely behind', as a hound follows the tail of its quarry, and by the twentieth century this developed into the detective sense of secretly following a person. The '-ed' ending then produces both the past tense of that verb and an adjective meaning 'having a tail of a stated kind', as in 'long-tailed'. The spelling keeps the 'ai' of 'tail', which is what separates it from the unrelated homophone-adjacent word 'tale'.

How the word is built

• tail (from Old English taegl: tail)
• -ed (past tense / adjectival suffix)