stranded

/ˈstɹændɪd/

stranded is the simple past and past participle of strand.

Adjective

stranded (not comparable)

Abandoned or marooned.
- I found myself stranded, lunchless, on the sea-front[…]1904, Rudyard Kipling, Mrs. Bathurst
- The 9.17 a.m. diesel train from Fraserburgh to Aberdeen, Scottish Region, was blocked by a snow drift just north of Newmachar Station on January 19. The 57 passengers were stranded for 15 hours.1960 March, “Notes and News: Diesel Train Stranded in Snow Drift”, in Railway Magazine, page 213
Run aground on a shore or reef.
Not having any expressed complement.
Made by combining or bundling thinner wires (into a strand).
That has become unrecoverable or difficult to recover.
- With utility deregulation, undepreciated equipment which is now redundant may have to be allocated as stranded costs.
Narrowly missing scoring a century or similar milestone because one's team's innings ends.
(in-compounds) Having the specified number or kind of strands.
- single-stranded, double-stranded, triple-stranded

strand (third-person singular simple present strands, present participle stranding, simple past and past participle stranded)

(transitive) To run aground; to beach.

Synonyms:

beach
(figuratively, transitive) To leave (someone) in a difficult situation; to abandon or desert.
1. (figuratively, transitive) To cause the third out of an inning to be made, leaving a runner on base.
  - Jones pops up; that's going to strand a pair.
(transitive) To leave an element (e.g., an adposition) without its complement adjacent to it.
- We first note that wh-movement can freely strand prepositions in Icelandic, as in the other Scandinavian languages.1985, Joan Maling, Annie Zaenen, “Preposition-Stranding and Passive”, in Nordic Journal of Linguistics, volume 8, number 2, →DOI, page 199

strand (third-person singular simple present strands, present participle stranding, simple past and past participle stranded)

From strand + -ed.

What does stranded mean?: Stranded means abandoned or marooned.
What is stranded the simple past and past participle of?: Stranded is the simple past and past participle of strand.
What part of speech is stranded?: Stranded is an adjective.
How do you pronounce stranded?: Stranded is pronounced /ˈstɹændɪd/.

Adapted from Wiktionary: stranded (page history and authors); strand (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-stranded.wav.

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