Tilted

How to spell tilted

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tilted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tilted mean?

1. adjectivePositioned at a slope or angle rather than level or upright.
2. verbMoved or caused to move into a sloping position; tipped to one side.

Tilted in a sentence

• adjective

  The painting on the office wall looked slightly tilted after the move.

• verb

  She tilted her chair back and rested against the wall.

• adjective

  The table sat at a tilted angle because one leg was shorter than the others.

• verb

  The strong wind tilted the parasol over the cafe terrace.

Where does tilted come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'tilt', which appears in Middle English as 'tilten' or 'tylten', meaning 'to topple over' or 'to cause to fall'. The earliest sense was about losing balance and tipping, and it likely descends from an unrecorded Old English form related to the Proto-Germanic words for being unsteady; the exact ancestor is not securely documented. Over time the harsher idea of toppling softened into the gentler modern sense of simply leaning or sloping to one side. A separate strand of the word grew out of medieval jousting, where knights would 'tilt' by charging at one another, which is why a contest or a leaning posture both came to share the spelling. The simple '-ed' ending added to the steady base 'tilt' keeps the spelling regular, with no doubled letter because the vowel before the final 't' is short but the consonant cluster 'lt' already closes the syllable.

How the word is built

• tilt (to lean or slope)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)