Wept

How to spell wept

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wept

What does wept mean?

1. verbPast tense of weep: shed tears, usually from grief or strong emotion.

Wept in a sentence

• She wept quietly at the back of the funeral.

• He wept with relief when the test results came back clear.

Where does wept come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wept is the past tense of the verb 'weep', which descends from the Old English wēpan, meaning 'to cry, to lament, or to shed tears'. The past form was originally something like weop in Old English, formed by changing the vowel rather than adding an ending, a pattern called ablaut that English inherited from its Germanic ancestors. The root traces back to a Proto-Germanic word wōpijaną that some scholars link to an imitation of the sound of crying or wailing aloud, so the word may have begun life as an echo of grief itself. Over the centuries the verb settled into the strong form we still use, which is why we say 'wept' rather than the regular 'weeped'. Its close relatives survive in several older Germanic languages, and the surviving irregular past is exactly the spelling point worth remembering: it ends in a hard '-pt', not the expected '-ed'.

How the word is built

• weep (Old English wēpan)
• irregular past-tense form (vowel change, not -ed)