Ticked

How to spell ticked

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ticked

What does ticked mean?

1. verbPast tense of tick: marked something with a small check or stroke to show it had been dealt with.
2. adjectiveInformally annoyed or irritated, usually in the phrase 'ticked off'.
3. verbPast tense of tick: made a series of short, light, recurring sounds, as a clock does.

Ticked in a sentence

• verb

  She ticked each item on the inventory as the boxes were unloaded.

• adjective

  He was clearly ticked off about the late delivery charge.

• verb

  The old wall clock ticked steadily through the silent night.

• verb

  The auditor ticked every figure that matched the receipts.

• adjective

  The staff felt ticked off when the bonus was quietly cancelled.

• verb

  The meter ticked as the taxi waited at the kerb.

Where does ticked come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'tick', a word with a delightfully tangled history. The earliest sense, 'to give a light touch or tap', appears in Middle English and is widely thought to be imitative in part, echoing a small sharp action; it has close relatives in Dutch 'tik' and Low German 'tikk', both meaning a light touch or pat, which points to a broadly Germanic origin. From the idea of a small tap grew two everyday strands: the sound a clock makes (the 'tick' of the escapement) and the small pen stroke used to check off an item, which gave British English the noun and verb for a checkmark. The informal sense 'ticked off', meaning annoyed, is a more recent twentieth-century development, originally American slang. Because the base word ends in a single short vowel followed by a hard 'ck', the spelling simply adds '-ed' with no doubling, which is why 'ticked' keeps both the c and the k before the ending.

How the word is built

• tick (light touch or small mark)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)