Toasted

How to spell toasted

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce toasted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does toasted mean?

1. adjectiveBrowned, crisped, or warmed by exposure to direct heat, especially bread or other food.
2. verbBrowned or warmed food by direct heat, as the past form of the verb to toast.

Toasted in a sentence

• adjective

  She spread butter and jam on the warm toasted bread.

• verb

  He toasted the bagel until the edges turned golden.

• adjective

  The recipe calls for a handful of lightly toasted almonds.

• verb

  The children toasted marshmallows over the campfire.

Where does toasted come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base word toast comes from the Latin verb torrere, which meant to parch, scorch, or dry with heat, and its past participle was tostus. That form passed into Old French as toster, meaning to grill or roast over a fire, and English borrowed it in the late 1300s for browning bread or other food by direct heat. The drinking sense, raising a glass to someone's health, grew out of an old custom of floating a piece of spiced toast in a cup of wine, so the honoured person was likened to that flavouring morsel. The same Latin torrere also gives us torrid, meaning scorchingly hot, which is a useful reminder that the core idea is heat. The spelling is straightforward: the familiar root toast simply takes the regular -ed ending, with no doubling or dropped letters to trip the writer up.

How the word is built

• toast (from Latin tostus, parched)
• -ed (past tense / adjectival suffix)