blocked

1. 1
   adjective

   Obstructed, so that movement or flow through is prevented or impeded.

   A blocked artery was the cause of the chest pain.

   Every exit was blocked by the crowd pushing to get in.

   Similarobstructed, clogged, jammed, congested

   Oppositeclear, open

2. 2
   adjective

   Of a computer account or similar, disabled or disconnected so as to prevent access or certain actions.

   All of the spammer's accounts were blocked within an hour.

   A blocked SIM cannot make calls even with credit on it.

   Similardisabled, suspended, locked

   Oppositeactive

3. 3
   adjective

   Unable to move because of an obstruction.

   The argument began over a blocked car in a shared driveway.

   Blocked traffic stretched back for miles behind the crash.

   Similarstuck, trapped

   Note

   The meaning flips here from the passage to the traveler. A blocked car in a driveway is in perfect working order; it simply has something in its way. With the obstructed-passage meaning, the road or drain is itself the problem. Context usually settles which is meant: ask whether the noun names the route or the thing trying to use it, as with blocked traffic.

4. 4
   adjective

   Of a person, phone number, address, or similar: banned or barred from connecting or logging on.

   The forum keeps a list of blocked addresses that grows every week.

   Once a caller is blocked, the phone rejects the number silently.

   Similarbanned, barred, blacklisted

   Note

   This is the telecommunications and online sense, applied to people, phone numbers and IP addresses that may no longer get through. The receiving side does the blocking: a phone rejects calls from blocked numbers, and a forum turns blocked users away. Compare the disabled-account meaning, where the account itself is switched off rather than refused at the door.

5. 5
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of block.

   The senator blocked the bill for the third session running.

   The director had blocked the scene before the actors arrived.

   Note

   A regular past form, with one spelling serving as both the simple past and the participle: they blocked the road; the road has been blocked. Every sense of the verb takes an object, from obstructing a passage to planning actors' moves in a scene, so all of them turn readily into the passive. In the exit was blocked, the participle shades easily into the adjective.

6. 6
   adjective

   Of a crossword grid: having black squares that separate the lights and mark the ends of words.

   British cryptics are usually set in a blocked grid of fifteen squares a side.

   Setters of blocked crosswords rarely have to worry about grid construction.

   Oppositebarred

   Note

   A setter's and solver's term for the everyday newspaper grid, where black squares divide the answers. Its opposite is barred, the format of the Listener, whose endgames, as Alan Connor describes, have hidden a normal blocked crossword inside the finished puzzle. The Chambers Crossword Dictionary finds the blocked format in papers in both Britain and the US, and the phrase usually travels as blocked grid.

7. 7
   adjectiveslangIreland

   Drunk.

   The teenager told the garda plainly that he was blocked.

   By closing time half the bar was blocked and singing.

   Similardrunk, plastered, hammered, locked, wasted

   Oppositesober

   Note

   Irish slang, and firmly informal. It sits most naturally after a verb, as in a blunt I'm blocked, rather than before a noun. Outside Ireland a listener may well hear one of the obstruction meanings instead, so keep it for casual talk where the Irish usage will be understood.

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