Texted

How to spell texted

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce texted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does texted mean?

1. verbSent someone a written message from a mobile phone.

Texted in a sentence

• She texted me the address right before lunch.

• He texted his manager to say the train was delayed.

Where does texted come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of the verb 'to text', which itself grew out of the noun 'text'. The noun reached English in the 1300s through Old French 'texte', from the Latin 'textus', meaning 'a thing woven together' or 'a piece of writing', built on the verb 'texere', 'to weave'. The image was that words were woven together into a fabric of meaning, the same idea that gives us 'textile' and 'texture' from that identical root. For most of its life 'text' was only a noun, but with the rise of mobile phones in the late 1990s and early 2000s it became a verb meaning to send a written message, and 'texted' was coined as its regular past tense by simply adding -ed. The spelling trap lives entirely in that ending: because the word already ends in a hard 't', speakers naturally say a clear extra syllable, yet some writers still hesitate over keeping both the final 't' of 'text' and the full '-ed'.

How the word is built

• text (root, from Latin textus 'a woven thing')
• -ed (past-tense suffix)