bayed

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of bay.

   The pack of hounds bayed as they closed in on the deer.

   Protesters bayed for change outside the courthouse all afternoon.

   Note

   A regular past form built with -ed, so one spelling covers both the simple past and the participle. The verb has two uses: intransitive, for a howl (the hounds bayed all night), and transitive, for barking at a quarry or driving it to bay. Only the transitive use can turn passive (a stag bayed by hounds), and that is where the participle earns its place.

2. 2
   adjective

   Having one or more bays: projecting or recessed sections of a wall, often filled with windows.

   The bayed front of the old cottage jutted out into the garden.

   They admired the bayed hall with its row of tall windows.

   Note

   An adjective that takes no more or most. To say how big the bays are, English puts a word in front instead. Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612) does just that with a "large-bay'd Barne" that the harvest fills each year, so the bays there are roomy sections of a farm building, not windows. Keep it apart from the hounds' past tense, which shares the spelling but not the meaning.

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