“Walk’d” But “Three-Legged”: The Curious Rules of the -ed Ending

Most of the time in English we pronounce “ed” at the end of a word as if there were no “e” in it. Words such as walked, talked, liked, jumped, thumbed, hummed, begged, dredged and lived all look as if they are two syllables, but we pronounce them as one: walk’d, begg’d etc.,

Even so, sometimes we pronounce that end syllable fully: for example, dated, waited, hated, mated, bedded, headed. Why is that? Aha! It’s when the stem word ends with a “t” or a “d”. Easy.

So what about those cases where there is no “t” or “d” but the “ed” is still pronounced as a full syllable in its own right? How do you know to say the following correctly: the blessed night, the learned professor, dearly beloved, naked, wicked, crooked, jagged, ragged, dogged?

Why do we fully pronounce the “ed” in these cases?

Until about 600 years ago, that “-ed” was almost always fully pronounced. In Chaucer's time (late 1300s), the “-ed” endings were still pronounced as full syllables in almost all cases Harvard, but a century or so later, unstressed schwa sounds were dropped in endings like “-ed”.

This is an example of the way languages "wear down" over time, as pronunciations become more “efficient” by eliminating sounds, especially unstressed vowels like the schwa sound that “-ed” represented. By the sixteenth century, the vowel was lost in “-ed” endings except where the preceding consonant was 't' or 'd' Oxford English Dictionary. The change was gradual. Writers occasionally dropped the 'e' or replaced it with an apostrophe even in Middle English, indicating the syllable was sometimes already lost in speech. For example, Shakespeare could pronounce words like "masked" as either two syllables (/maskɪd/) or one (/maskt/), depending on what worked with the meter.

Now, we pronounce “ed” as a full syllable after “t” or “d” because otherwise the sounds blur together; it needs a little bit of vowel to separate them. In other cases, it's because these are adjectives that became fixed in English before the pronunciation shift occurred - whether they're archaic/poetic words like "blessèd" and "learnèd," or everyday adjectives like "wicked," "crooked," and "naked" that just happen to have preserved the older form because … well, who knows? Maybe because it sounds learned, or old-school cool. In compound constructions like “three-legged,” English rhythm often prefers the extra syllable for flow and clarity.

If you’re a native English speaker, you already knew how to pronounce these words, but could you have explained the rules? I certainly couldn’t have explained them until a day ago because I didn’t know them. Every day is a school day.