Trimmed

How to spell trimmed

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce trimmed

What does trimmed mean?

1. verbCut away an excess part of something to make it neater or smaller, in the past tense.
2. adjectiveMade neat or tidy by having excess parts cut off.

Trimmed in a sentence

• verb

  The barber trimmed his beard before the interview.

• adjective

  A freshly trimmed lawn stretched across the garden.

• verb

  Management trimmed the annual budget by ten percent.

• adjective

  Neatly trimmed hedges lined the driveway.

Where does trimmed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of 'trim', a word that traces back to the Old English verb 'trymman' (also written 'trymian'), which meant to make firm, to strengthen, or to set in good order. That sense of putting things into proper arrangement is the thread that runs through the whole history of the word, so an early meaning was closer to 'prepare' or 'make ready' than to 'cut'. By the 1500s the idea of neatening and tidying had broadened into snipping away excess to leave something neat, giving us the modern sense of cutting hair, hedges, or budgets. The nautical use, as in trimming the sails to balance a ship, comes straight from that original notion of arranging things correctly. The spelling trap in 'trimmed' is purely mechanical: because 'trim' ends in a single consonant after a short stressed vowel, that consonant doubles before the -ed ending, which is why writers must remember the double m.

How the word is built

• trim (to cut, make neat)
• -m- (consonant doubled after a short stressed vowel)
• -ed (past tense suffix)