Boughte

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Archaic past tense of buy, meaning obtained in exchange for money in an earlier time
2. An old-fashioned spelling of the past tense of purchase, referring to something paid for previously
3. Formerly acquired through payment, an older form of the simple past of the verb to buy

Etymology: "Boughte" is a historical spelling of the past tense and past participle of "buy," the form that "bought" took in some earlier English writing. The standard "bought" descends from Old English "bohte," the past tense of "bycgan," to buy. The ending "-te" that "boughte" adds is the regular Middle English past-tense ending, the same family of endings that gave us "kept" and "slept," so the spelling reflects an older way of forming the past tense that was common before "bought" settled as the standard form. The Old English vowel was pronounced differently from today's, and the spelling "boughte" with its "gh" tracks the sound of the word at the time it was written. Spellings like this appeared frequently in Middle and early Modern English, when writers were not yet bound by a fixed standard, and they were often written with the same vowel and consonant sequence as "bought" or "thought." Modern English has kept "bought" as the only accepted spelling, so "boughte" now reads as an archaism or a typo.