Language usage: "wound up" vs. "winded up"

Factual Questions
1

I’m reading CityRoom blog on the New York Times’ website. In one of the entries by a regular Times staff writer (not a reader or other outsider) is this line:

" …He wanted to go hunt Osama bin Laden, but winded up in Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11… "

My brain goes: “winded up”???

I always thought it was “wound up.” But maybe this is like “hanged” and “hung” where both forms can be correct depending on usage. Still, I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard “winded up.”

Is the writer correct?

2

Sounds weird to me but my dictionary allows it, though prefers “wound.” It does not specifically address the idiom as used but in the sense of twisting around.

3

I feel that if this is going to be correct at all, it would have to be in this context. I cannot imagine that “I am all winded up” could ever be correct.

4

“Winded” is probably just bad usage, but I wonder if it could be the remnants of an older verb, a possibility if two different verbs were once used in English: One to suggest “winding” as done to a thing–like in “I wind the clock” (i.e. transitive form) vs. “wind” as in “The clock winds down” (i.e. intransitive). Similar to the distinction between “lie/lay”, “rise/raise”, and what was posted in this thread on “hung” vs. “hanged”.

5

That’s a new one to me. I have seen “winded,” but only when it meant “out of breath” from exertion, and it had a short i sound.

6

there’s also ‘the long and winded road’, which has a long ‘i’ sound (as in the personal pronoun).

7

Isn’t that the “long and winding” road?

Or was I being whooshed?

8

D’oh :smack:

9

I think I’ve heard “winded” in that particular usage more than any other, except maybe phrases like “winded it with magnet wire,” etc. I like “wound” better, too.

Depending on your background or frame of mind, I guess it could seem “off” either way, because either way there’s a homograph. (The other way is illustrated by a line from the Mikado: “My wounds with vengeance shall be wound.”)

(Heh. She wounded me with magnet wire.)

10

It’s perfectly sound. As OED says, winded is the weak past participle of wind, although wound is far more common.

11

It’s not surprising that another irregular word is on its way out. In my lifetime I have seen the word rooves become virtually archaic.

12

To me, the more surprising thing is the regular word that becomes irregular through usage. The best example I know is the past tense of “sneak”, which in standard English is “sneaked” but more and more people say “snuck”.

Ed

13

The rate at which irregular verbs become regularized has been studied. According to that article, of the 177 verbs studied, 79 became regularized over a period of 1200 years.

A more frequently used verb is less likely to become regularized and the most common verbs (be, can, do, go, have, say, see, take, …) are all irregular.

14

This happens occasionally, but the general tendency is for irregulars to become regular: pled => pleaded; lit => lighted; dreamt => dreamed, etc.

The sneak/snuck phenomenon probably has come about because of the vowel morphology: fling/flung; sling/slung; spring/sprung; sting;/stung. Granted, those are all nasals, so I share your surprise.

15

Dive/dove has nearly become standard too, presumably because of similarity to drive/drove.

16

I’ve always used “wound up” as in “Elmer ate too many raw oysters and wound up in the hospital with food poisoning.”

When I hear “winded up”, I always think that it’s a cross between “wound up” and “ended up”.

17

Hasn’t “pleaded” been the standard for a long time? It seems to me that this is the other way around: Jargonic use of “pled” by cops is bleeding into general usage.

18

Does it matter which side of the vowel the nasal is on? If sneaked becomes snuck, what might eked become (if anybody used it)?