had
/hæd/
Word Rarity
Common
Frequency: Zipf frequency 6.33 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
3
Letters
1
Syllables
3
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
simple past and past participle of have
verb
Used to form the past perfect tense, expressing an action that took place prior to a reference point that is itself in the past.
Example Sentences
- "This morning I had an egg for breakfast."
- "A good time was had by all."
- "About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton,[…]."
- "I felt sure that I had seen him before."
- "When I'd (already) done some exercise, I had a cappuccino."
- "Cooper seems an odd choice, but imagine if they had taken MTV's advice and chosen Robert Pattinson?"
Etymology
From Middle English hadde (preterite), yhad (past participle), from Old English hæfde (first and third person singular preterite), ġehæfd (past participle), from Proto-Germanic *habdaz, past and past participle stem of *habjaną (“to have”), equivalent to have + -ed. Cognate with Dutch had, German hatte, Swedish hade, Icelandic hafði.