Climbed

Part of speech: verb

Pronunciation: /klaɪmd/

Definitions

1. To have successfully moved upwards to a higher elevation or location, often with physical effort involved, while also indicating a progression in rank or achievement over challenges faced
2. To have gone up from a lower level to a higher one by physical effort
3. Having ascended to a place above the starting point through exertion

Etymology: "Climbed" is simply the past tense and past participle of "climb," so its history is the history of the verb itself. That verb descends from Old English "climban," which meant the same thing, and it reaches back to a Proto-Germanic root "klimbanǫ" whose core sense was "to go up by clinging." The idea of clinging is built into the word's ancestry: scholars believe it was a nasalised variant of a Germanic verb meaning "to stick, cleave," which traces to an Indo-European root meaning "to stick." In other words, the original climber was something that held on to a surface, not simply something that moved upward. That sticking sense explains the family resemblance the word shares with its relatives. German "klimmen," Dutch "klimmen," and Icelandic "klifra" all mean "to climb," and "clamber" is a close English cousin, carrying a similar sense of scrambling upward with hands and feet. Even "clay" and "glue," which look unrelated, belong to the same ancient family of words about things that stick together.

Synonyms: ascended, scaled, rose, mountained, surmounted

Antonyms: descended, fell, dropped, plummeted, sank