blasted

1. 1
   adjectivecolloquial

   Damned or accursed; used to express anger, contempt, or annoyance about the thing it modifies.

   He cursed the blasted machine that had jammed yet again.

   Why won't this blasted door stay shut for once?

   Similardamned, darned, confounded, cursed, wretched

   Note

   The curse here is a mild one, and it always stands before its noun: this blasted part, this blasted rot. It keeps company with stronger words. G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) stacks it beside damned in a single breathless tirade. It also turns up in Norman Lindsay's Redheap (1930) and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997).

2. 2
   adjective

   Damaged or destroyed by an explosion.

   Engineers inspected the blasted tunnel before clearing the debris.

   The blasted hillside revealed seams of ore beneath the surface.

   Similarshattered, wrecked, ruined

   Oppositeintact

   Note

   Here the word is literal, and it does not take degrees: a tank is blasted or it is not. Before a noun it can collide with the curse-word meaning, so the blasted tank might be wrecked or merely resented. In writing about real explosions, let the context, such as a landmine or debris, make the literal reading obvious.

3. 3
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of blast.

   The crew blasted a new path through the mountainside.

   Workers blasted away tons of rock to widen the highway.

   Note

   A regular -ed form doing double duty: the crew blasted the rock, and the rock has been blasted. The verb runs from making a din to shattering things to cursing them, and this participle passes each meaning on to the adjectives. The shattering becomes the explosion meaning and the cursing becomes the swearword. In casual speech it also covers music played loud, as when someone blasted the stereo all night.

4. 4
   adjectiveslang

   Extremely drunk; heavily intoxicated.

   She showed up to the reunion already blasted on cheap wine.

   After three rounds of shots, the whole group was utterly blasted.

   Similarwasted, hammered, plastered, smashed, sloshed

   Oppositesober

   Note

   Party slang that works after a verb: you get blasted, or you were blasted last night. That position matters, because before a noun the word usually turns into the curse-word meaning. A blasted guest sounds cursed rather than drunk. Keep it to casual talk among friends.

5. 5
   adverbcolloquial

   Extremely; used as an intensifier carrying annoyance or emphasis.

   The whole process is blasted complicated and takes hours.

   You're blasted lucky the storm missed us entirely.

   Similardamned, darned, bloody

   Note

   The adverb sits directly before an adjective and charges it with irritation: so blasted stubborn, blasted lucky. It is the curse-word adjective put to work on qualities instead of things, and it stays just as casual. Unlike that adjective, it can be graded, with more blasted and most blasted as its comparative and superlative.

6. 6
   adjective

   Damaged by violent gusts of wind; battered by a storm.

   They surveyed the blasted moorland after the overnight gale.

   The blasted orchard had lost half its branches by morning.

   Similarbattered, windswept

   Note

   Trees are its natural subject: a blasted tree, a blasted trunk. In Modern Painters (1846), John Ruskin describes the blasted trunk in Turner's drawing of the spot where Harold fell at Hastings, its boughs forking into the shape of an arrowhead. That company of painting and storm-beaten landscape gives the sense a descriptive, pictorial air.

7. 7
   adjective

   In heraldry, of a tree or bush: having branches that bear no leaves.

   The family's coat of arms shows a blasted oak, its bare branches black against a silver field.

   For the new design, the herald replaced the leafy pine with a blasted one to mark the family's losses in the war.

   Similarleafless, bare

   Oppositeleafy

   Note

   Heraldry uses the word for how a tree is drawn: bare trunk and branches, no foliage. In a blazon it follows the charge and comes before the color, as in Henry Gough's Glossary of Terms Used in British Heraldry (1847): "three scrogs, blasted, sable." A blasted oak may still sprout new branches near its base, so the term records the drawing rather than an event, unlike the storm-damaged meaning.

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