Won

How to spell won

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce won

What does won mean?

1. verbThe past tense of 'win': to have been victorious in, or to have gained something through competition or effort.
2. nounThe basic monetary unit of North and South Korea.

Won in a sentence

• verb

  Our team won the championship last season after years of trying.

• noun

  The hotel bill came to fifty thousand won, which surprised the tourists.

• verb

  She won the contract because her proposal was the cheapest and most detailed.

• noun

  The exchange office quoted the rate for the South Korean won that morning.

Where does won come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of 'win', which descends from the Old English verb 'winnan', meaning 'to labour, struggle, or fight'. In its earliest sense the word was about the effort of contending rather than the prize, so to 'win' something originally meant to gain it through hard struggle. The past form developed through the Germanic pattern of changing the inner vowel (compare 'sing' and 'sung', 'run' and 'ran') rather than tacking on an ending, which is why we say 'won' and not 'winned'. The verb has cousins across the Germanic languages, including the German 'gewinnen' (to gain), and over the centuries the sense softened from violent struggle to simply being victorious or earning a reward. Its identical sound to the number 'one' is purely coincidental, the two words come from entirely separate roots, but that overlap is the main spelling trap to keep in mind.

How the word is built

• won (past tense and past participle of 'win', formed by an old vowel change from the root 'winn-' rather than by adding -ed)

Words that sound like won

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• one: The number 1; a single person or thing.