Travelled

How to spell travelled

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce travelled

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does travelled mean?

1. verbMade a journey from one place to another; went on a trip in the past.

Travelled in a sentence

• Last summer they travelled across three countries by train.

• She travelled for work almost every week before the office closed.

Where does travelled come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past form of 'travel', a word with a surprisingly painful history. It comes from the Old French verb 'travailler', meaning 'to toil' or 'to labour hard', and behind that lies the Late Latin 'trepalium', the name of a three-pronged instrument of torture (literally 'three stakes', from 'tres' meaning three and 'palus' meaning stake). The link is that journeys in the medieval world were so arduous and dangerous that 'to travel' literally meant 'to suffer and struggle'; the modern sense of simply going from place to place softened over the 1300s and 1400s. The closely related English word 'travail', meaning painful effort, preserves the older, harsher meaning to this day. The spelling trap here is the doubled l: in British and Canadian usage the final l of 'travel' is doubled before the ending even though the stress falls on the first syllable, which is why it ends up as 'travelled' rather than the American 'traveled'.

How the word is built

• travel (to journey)
• -led (doubled l
• -ed past tense, British/Canadian convention of doubling the final l)

British and American spelling

Travelled is the British spelling. American English spells it traveled.