bedded

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of bed.

   They bedded the new shrubs along the fence last fall.

   The cables were bedded in a trench beneath the road.

   Note

   Bed doubles its final consonant before -ed, as short one-syllable verbs do, and one form serves as both past tense and participle: they bedded the shrubs; the cables were bedded. Many adjective uses of bedded are this participle settled into place. A 'bedded wife' comes from the sexual verb, and 'bedded children' from putting or going to bed, so a phrase can often be read either way.

2. 2
   adjective

   Furnished with one or more beds, or with a stated number or type of beds.

   The new hospital wing is fully bedded and ready to admit patients.

   Each holiday lodge is generously bedded for a family of five.

   Note

   Mostly the second half of a compound, where a number or type is hyphenated to it. A ward may be two-bedded or 20-bedded, and An Official Guide to Eastern Asia (1917) books single- and double-bedded rooms. Hospitals and hotels use it most, because they count capacity in beds. Without a number in front it simply means supplied with beds, as when a new wing is described as fully bedded.

3. 3
   adjective

   Forming or containing horizontal layers, as a deposit of mineral or ore laid down in flat sheets.

   The bedded ironstone could be traced clearly across the whole hillside.

   Miners followed the bedded ore wherever the seam dipped underground.

   Similarlayered, stratified

   Note

   A geologist's word for rock built in strata: roughly horizontal layers laid down one after another, with bedding planes between them. Thickness goes in a hyphenated compound, as in thin-bedded grainstone or medium-bedded packstone. Mining and engineering speak of bedded deposits of potash, iron or lead, and of bedded salt weighed as a repository for nuclear waste. In this sense the bed is a layer of stone, not a place to lie.

4. 4
   adjective

   Growing in or arranged within a bed: a plot or area where plants, seaweed, or shellfish are gathered together in numbers.

   She admired the carefully bedded herbs outside the kitchen door.

   Harvesters worked the bedded mussels at low tide along the estuary.

   Note

   Here the bed is a gardener's plot or a shore-gatherer's patch, and the phrase 'bedded reeds' shows how easily this meaning blurs with the lying-flat meaning. In Philip Gilbert Hamerton's lines of 1876, the bedded reeds are massed together and sounding their 'dreary melody', not pressed to the ground. Context decides: plants that are growing and arranged belong here, and plants that are flattened belong there.

5. 5
   adjective

   Having a floor covered with straw, sand, woodchips, or similar bedding material.

   A deeply bedded pen helps keep the piglets dry and comfortable.

   The kennels were thickly bedded with clean wood shavings each morning.

   Note

   A farm and veterinary word, usually compounded with the material or depth of the litter: sand-bedded freestalls, deep-bedded stalls, a non-bedded hog house. It follows the same pattern as the room compounds of the furnished-with-beds meaning. Here, though, the bedding is loose material on the floor, and studies of cattle lameness and animal welfare turn on exactly that difference.

6. 6
   adjective

   Lying flat or pressed down against a surface.

   Wind and rain left the bedded barley flattened across the field.

   The hikers found a patch of bedded reeds by the water's edge.

   Similarflattened, lodged, prostrate

   Oppositeupright, standing

   Note

   Shakespeare gives this sense its most vivid moment. In Hamlet (1601), the prince's 'bedded hair', lying smooth, starts up and stands on end like sleeping soldiers roused by an alarm. In technical prose it describes what has settled flat, as when bedded sediment is set against suspended sediment. Keep it apart from the layered-rock meaning, which describes stone built up in sheets rather than something pressed down.

7. 7
   adjective

   Having sexual experience; no longer a virgin.

   By the customs of the court, a bedded queen was expected to produce an heir.

   He spoke of her as a bedded woman, worldly and unafraid of judgment.

   Oppositevirgin, virginal

   Note

   Its home is the old pairing 'wedded and bedded', for a wife whose marriage has been consummated. John Boys, Dean of Canterbury, uses it in 1630. Jane Ohlmeyer's Making Ireland English (2012) quotes 'a married, nay a bedded wife'. The noun it modifies is nearly always wife. Shashi Tharoor's Show Business (1992) twists it into 'awfully bedded wife', a joke that works because 'lawfully wedded' is so familiar.

8. 8
   adjective

   Having already gone to bed for the night.

   The guests were all bedded long before the storm reached the coast.

   Once the patients were bedded, the night nurse dimmed the ward lights.

   Similarasleep

   Oppositeawake, up

   Note

   A writer's adjective, usually placed before its noun to show a whole household gone quiet for the night. James Robertson's 'bedded house' (1780) lies silent except for the maid's snoring. James Kennedy's 'bedded children' (1849) dare not speak above a breath. Clarence Deming uses it in 1884 for a 'bedded family' that darts out for food. After a verb (the guests were bedded) it reads as the participle of putting someone to bed.

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