Went

How to spell went

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce went

What does went mean?

1. verbThe past tense of 'go': moved or travelled from one place to another, or proceeded in some manner.

Went in a sentence

• She went to the office early to finish the report.

• The meeting went smoothly despite the short notice.

Where does went come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Went is one of the strangest verb forms in English because it does not actually belong to the verb 'go' at all. It began as the past tense of an entirely different Old English verb, 'wendan', meaning 'to turn' or 'to direct one's course', which still survives in the modern word 'wend' (as in 'to wend your way home'). The original past tense of 'go' was 'eode', a form so unlike its present tense that speakers gradually abandoned it. During the late Middle Ages, English borrowed 'went' from 'wend' to fill that gap, and the two verbs effectively swapped histories, leaving 'wend' to acquire a new regular past tense, 'wended'. This kind of patched-together verb, where the past tense comes from a different root than the present, is called suppletion, the same pattern seen in 'am' and 'was'. Because 'went' is so common and so short, it is rarely misspelled, but its origin explains why it bears no resemblance whatsoever to 'go'.

How the word is built

• went (irregular past tense of 'go', historically the past tense of 'wend')