Wrote

How to spell wrote

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wrote

What does wrote mean?

1. verbPast tense of 'write': formed letters, words, or text on a surface, or composed a piece of writing.

Wrote in a sentence

• She wrote her name at the top of the exam paper.

• The novelist wrote three books before finding a publisher.

Where does wrote come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of 'write', which descends from the Old English verb wrītan, meaning 'to scratch, score, or carve'. Before paper was common, letters were literally cut or scratched into wood, bark, or stone, so the earliest sense of the word was about incising marks rather than putting ink on a page. The strong-verb pattern of Old English gave the past form wrāt, which over the centuries softened into modern 'wrote', much as 'drive' yields 'drove'. The silent initial 'w' is a fossil of that Germanic origin: it was once fully pronounced, and the related words 'write', 'written', and 'writ' all preserve the same telltale wr- cluster. That silent letter is exactly the spelling trap, because the word sounds identical to 'rote', the dull memorising-by-repetition word, which has no 'w' at all.

How the word is built

• wr- (silent w from Old English wrītan: to scratch, carve)
• -ote (strong past-tense vowel change from write)