Thrown

How to spell thrown

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce thrown

What does thrown mean?

1. verbThe past participle of throw: propelled through the air, or cast or put somewhere with force.

Thrown in a sentence

• The ball had been thrown over the fence by one of the children.

• By the time we arrived, the old paperwork had already been thrown away.

Where does thrown come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of the verb 'throw', which descends from the Old English verb thrawan, meaning 'to twist, turn, or curl'. The original sense was about twisting and turning something, and you can still see that older meaning in the way a potter 'throws' a pot by spinning clay, and in the noun 'throe' for a twisting spasm. Over the medieval period the dominant sense shifted toward hurling or casting an object through the air, perhaps from the rotating motion of the arm. The strong-verb pattern gave us throw, threw, and thrown, where the past participle keeps the -n ending shared by many old Germanic verbs such as 'grown' and 'flown'. Because it sounds exactly like 'throne', the seat of a monarch (an unrelated word borrowed from Greek by way of Latin and French), the two are a classic spelling mix-up.

How the word is built

• throw (Old English thrawan: to twist, turn, hurl)
• -n (past participle ending)

Words that sound like thrown

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• throw: To propel something through the air with a movement of the arm and hand.