Worked

How to spell worked

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce worked

What does worked mean?

1. verbCarried out a job or task, or operated and functioned, at some time in the past.

Worked in a sentence

• She worked late into the evening to finish the report.

• The engineers worked together on the new design for months.

Where does worked come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'work', which descends from the Old English noun 'weorc' and the matching verb 'wyrcan', both meaning labour or the activity of making something. These came from a Germanic root shared with the Dutch 'werk' and the German 'Werk', all carrying the sense of a deed, a task, or something produced by effort. The Greek word 'ergon', meaning a deed or task, springs from the same distant ancestor and survives in English in 'energy' and 'ergonomic'. The past form has been written with a simple '-ed' ending for centuries, even though it is pronounced with a final 't' sound, and that mismatch is the only mild spelling trap: it is 'worked', never 'workt'.

How the word is built

• work (root: labour, effort)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)