Wrapped

How to spell wrapped

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wrapped

What does wrapped mean?

1. verbPast tense of wrap: covered or enclosed something by folding material around it.

Wrapped in a sentence

• She wrapped the birthday present in shiny gold paper.

• He wrapped a warm scarf around his neck before leaving the house.

Where does wrapped come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'wrap', a word whose ultimate origin is genuinely uncertain, which is why scholars hedge about it. It first appears in Middle English as 'wrappen', meaning to fold, wind, or cover something by coiling material around it, and it is recorded from around the 1300s. It may be related to similar words in the North Germanic and Low German family that carry the sense of folding or rolling, but no single clear ancestor has been pinned down. The initial 'w' is silent in modern speech, a spelling fossil that survived even though the sound disappeared, which is the main reason writers sometimes drop it. The doubling of the 'p' before the '-ed' ending follows the regular English rule for a short stressed vowel, and that doubled consonant plus the silent 'w' makes the word easy to confuse with its homophones 'rapt' and 'rapped'.

How the word is built

• wrap (to fold or coil around)
• -p- (doubled consonant)
• -ed (past tense suffix)