Word.ws English Dictionary

wept

/wɛpt/

wept is the simple past and past participle of weep.

Meaning of weep

Verb

weep (third-person singular simple present weeps, present participle weeping, simple past and past participle wept or (poetic, otherwise nonstandard) weeped)

  1. To cry; to shed tears, especially when accompanied with sobbing or other difficulty speaking, as an expression of emotion such as sadness or joy.
    • They wept together in silence.1847 November 1, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie, Boston, Mass.: William D. Ticknor & Company, →OCLC, part I
  2. To lament; to complain.
    • They weep unto me, saying, Give us flesh, that we may eat.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Numbers 11:13
  3. To produce secretions.
  4. To flow in drops; to run in drops.
    • a weeping spring, which discharges water slowly
  5. To hang the branches, as if in sorrow; to be pendent; to droop; said of a plant or its branches.
    • The willows weep and the moonbeams sleep / On the mariner's silent grave.1893, Edward William Cole, The best song book in the world, page 314
  6. (obsolete, transitive) To weep over; to bewail.
    • Fair Venus wept the sad disaster
      Of having lost her favorite dove.1717, Matthew Prior, The Dove

See all 10 meanings of weep

Forms of wept

alternative poetic (nonstandard)weeped

Origin of wept

From weep + -t.

Words formed from wept

Phrases with wept

Words that rhyme with wept

9 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about wept

What is wept the simple past and past participle of?
Wept is the simple past and past participle of weep.
How do you pronounce wept?
Wept is pronounced /wɛpt/.

Words near wept in the dictionary

  1. weoman
  2. weomen
  3. Weott
  4. wep
  5. Wepo Wash
  6. wept
  7. wept buckets
  8. wept Irish
  9. wepte
  10. weptest
  11. wer

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wept (page history and authors); weep (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Pvanp7-wept.wav, en-us-wept.ogg.

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