Word.ws English Dictionary

saddened

saddened is the simple past and past participle of sadden.

Meaning of sadden

Verb

sadden (third-person singular simple present saddens, present participle saddening, simple past and past participle saddened)

  1. (transitive) To make sad or unhappy.
    • It saddens me to think that I might have hurt someone.
    Synonyms:
    deject, depress
  2. (intransitive, rare) To become sad or unhappy.
    • He saddens, all the magic light
      ⁠Dies off at once from bower and hall,
      ⁠And all the place is dark, and all
      The chambers emptied of delight: […]1850, [Alfred, Lord Tennyson], “Canto VIII”, in In Memoriam, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC
  3. (rare, transitive) To darken a color during dyeing.
    • Curve (E) is seen at a glance to represent green saddened down to its fifth shade, and reduced with white to its fourth tint.1903, Society of Dyers and Colourists, Bradford, Eng. (Yorkshire), The Journal, page 129
    Synonyms:
    shade, tinge
  4. (transitive) To render heavy, hard, or cohesive; to compress or thicken.
    • Marle's binding and sadning of land being the great Prejudice it doth to Clay-lands.1707, J[ohn] Mortimer, The Whole Art of Husbandry; or, The Way of Managing and Improving of Land. […], London: […] J[ohn] H[umphreys] for H[enry] Mortlock […], and J[onathan] Robinson […], →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    deepen, thicken

Phrases with saddened

Questions about saddened

What is saddened the simple past and past participle of?
Saddened is the simple past and past participle of sadden.

Words near saddened in the dictionary

  1. Saddar
  2. sadded
  3. sadden
  4. sadden up
  5. sadden'd
  6. saddened
  7. saddened up
  8. saddener
  9. saddeners
  10. saddenest
  11. saddeneth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: saddened (page history and authors); sadden (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “saddened.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/saddened. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.