Meaning

noun hardy wheat grown mostly in Europe for livestock feed

verb orally recite the letters of or give the spelling of

verb indicate or signify

originFrom Late Middle English spelde (past tense) and spelled, ispeled, ispelled (past participles). The past tense reflects an early Middle English syncopation of spellede, while the past participle remained largely disyllabic until the general Early Modern English reduction of the -ed suffix. In both cases, once the medial vowel was lost, the final alveolar stop underwent phonetic devoicing after…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0