Winded means you cannot breathe easily for a short time, usually because your breath has been knocked out of you or used up. Two situations bring it up. The first is being hit: a ball, an elbow, or the ground hits you in the stomach, and suddenly you cannot pull air in at all. It is frightening the first time, because for a few seconds your body simply will not take a breath, but it passes by itself. The second is hard exercise: you run up six floors of stairs and arrive at the top gasping, and you say you are winded. It is an adjective here, and you meet it as 'be winded' or 'get winded' — 'I was winded', 'he got winded', or 'a winded runner'. There is also the verb 'wind' behind it, said with the vowel of 'find' when it means this: 'the punch winded him'. That verb is not common in everyday talk; the past form 'winded' is what people actually say. Note that being winded is short and physical. It is not the same as being unfit or tired all over — you can be winded for thirty seconds and then be completely fine. A quite separate word is also spelled 'winded': 'the road winded through the hills' (though 'wound' is the normal past form there). Same letters, different word entirely.