Tattooed
verbMarked permanently on the skin with ink, by means of a needle.
How to spell tattooed
8 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce tattooed
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does tattooed mean?
- verbMarked permanently on the skin with ink, by means of a needle.
Tattooed in a sentence
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His forearm was tattooed with a small anchor.
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She got her shoulder tattooed during her holiday.
Where does tattooed come from?
Language of origin: Other
The base word tattoo entered English from the Polynesian languages of the Pacific, where the Tahitian and Samoan word tatau described the practice of marking the skin with ink, a term thought to echo the tapping sound of the tool used to drive pigment under the skin. English sailors encountered it in the late 1700s, and the explorer Captain James Cook recorded it after his Pacific voyages around 1769, popularising both the word and the custom in Europe. The spelling settled with a double t and a double o, and the past form simply adds -ed, which is exactly where writers stumble, since the run of doubled letters tempts them to drop one. This tattoo, meaning a skin marking, should not be confused with the older, unrelated tattoo meaning a military drumbeat or signal, which came separately from the Dutch phrase taptoe, an order to shut off the beer taps at night. The skin-marking sense is now by far the more common one in everyday writing.
How the word is built
- tattoo (the ink-marking, from Tahitian tatau)
- -ed (past tense / past participle)
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