Timed

How to spell timed

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce timed

What does timed mean?

1. verbMeasured how long something took, or arranged for it to happen at a particular moment.

Timed in a sentence

• The coach timed each runner with a stopwatch.

• She timed the meeting to finish before lunch.

Where does timed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'time', which grew out of the Old English noun 'tima', meaning a stretch or point of time, a season, or a fitting moment. The same Germanic root also gave English the word 'tide', which once meant a period or appointed time before it narrowed to the movement of the sea. The verb sense, 'to measure or arrange the timing of something', developed later, and the inflected form simply adds the regular past-tense ending. Because the base word ends in a silent 'e', that 'e' is dropped before the '-d' is added, which is exactly why the spelling is 'timed' and not 'timeed'. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for centuries, since the root is one of the oldest and most ordinary words in the language.

How the word is built

• time (from Old English tima: a period or point)
• -d (past tense / past participle suffix, with the silent e of 'time' absorbed)