Wrecked

How to spell wrecked

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wrecked

What does wrecked mean?

1. verbDamaged, destroyed, or ruined something, especially a vehicle, structure, or plan.
2. adjectiveIn a state of ruin or, informally, completely exhausted.

Wrecked in a sentence

• verb

  The storm wrecked the harbour wall overnight.

• adjective

  After the night shift she felt utterly wrecked and slept past noon.

• verb

  A careless driver wrecked two parked cars on our street.

• adjective

  The abandoned factory looked wrecked and unsafe to enter.

Where does wrecked come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The base word 'wreck' comes from Old Norse, where 'vrek' or 'wrek' described something that the sea had driven ashore, closely tied to the verb 'reka', meaning 'to drive' or 'to push'. The notion passed into Anglo-Norman as 'wrec', a legal term for goods washed up from a shipwreck, and entered English in the medieval period to describe ruined ships and their scattered cargo. Over time the meaning widened from a literally broken vessel to anything destroyed, smashed, or brought to ruin, and the simple past form 'wrecked' developed with the standard '-ed' ending. The silent 'w' at the front is the great spelling trap; English once pronounced that 'wr-' cluster fully, as in 'write' and 'wrist', but the 'w' fell silent while the spelling stubbornly kept it. It also helps to keep 'wrecked' apart from its look-alikes 'wracked' (tortured) and 'wreaked' (inflicted), which share neither origin nor exact meaning.

How the word is built

• wreck (something driven ashore, ruin)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)