abandoned

1. 1
   adjective

   Left behind and no longer cared for by its former owners, residents, or caretakers; deserted.

   Vines had crept over the windows of the abandoned farmhouse.

   Photographers are drawn to the eerie quiet of an abandoned hospital.

   Similardeserted, forsaken, discarded

   Oppositeoccupied, inhabited, maintained

2. 2
   verb

   Past participle of abandon.

   The crew had abandoned the ship long before it sank.

   The original plan was abandoned once the funding dried up.

   Note

   One spelling serves both the simple past and the past participle, as with any regular verb. As a participle it takes have in the perfect (the crew had abandoned the ship) and be in the passive (the plan was abandoned). Every current sense of abandon is transitive, so the passive comes easily. From that passive it is a short step to the adjective "deserted".

3. 3
   adjective

   Showing no restraint or inhibition; wild and uninhibited in feeling or behavior.

   He threw himself into the song with an abandoned enthusiasm that startled the audience.

   Their abandoned laughter rang through the house well past midnight.

   Similardissolute

   Oppositerestrained, inhibited, controlled, reserved

   Note

   Applied to pleasures rather than persons, the word turns from condemnation to something warmer. The noun it modifies usually names a feeling or an indulgence: an abandoned enjoyment of life, or the abandoned luxury of W. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence (1919). Its synonym dissolute shows how close it stays to the "wicked" meaning, so context decides whether the lack of restraint is being admired or judged.

4. 4
   adjective

   Given over to vice and wickedness; immoral and sinning without restraint.

   The novel follows an abandoned aristocrat who squandered his fortune on every vice imaginable.

   Chroniclers condemned the emperor as an abandoned tyrant ruled entirely by cruelty.

   Similarevil, immoral, wicked, depraved, corrupt

   Oppositevirtuous, moral, upright, righteous

   Note

   A moral verdict built from the reflexive verb: someone abandoned has abandoned themselves, given themselves up to vice. It is gradable, and its natural home is the superlative of condemnation. Alexander Davidson's A Complete History of Illinois writes of "the vilest and most abandoned scoundrels." Before a noun for a person it can be misread as the "deserted" meaning, but an abandoned scoundrel has been left by no one.

5. 5
   adjective

   No longer acted upon by the geologic forces that originally formed it.

   An abandoned meander becomes an oxbow lake once the river carves a new path.

   The abandoned shoreline now sits well above the current water level.

   Oppositeactive

   Note

   Geologists use the word for landforms stranded by change: a channel, meander or shoreline that the processes which shaped it have left behind. Such a feature survives as a relict, recording past rather than present conditions. Here the word is a technical classifier, not an image of neglect. An abandoned channel has lost its river, not its owner, unlike the "deserted" meaning.

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