bottomed

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of bottom.

   Sales bottomed in midwinter and began climbing again by spring.

   The submarine bottomed gently on the seabed during the dive test.

   Note

   A regular form: bottom simply adds -ed, so the past (they bottomed) and the participle (had bottomed, was bottomed) share one spelling. The passive can look like the compound adjective, but the verb takes its own complement. A chair is bottomed with cane, and a claim is bottomed on or upon earlier work. Two older uses of the verb are obsolete: winding thread into a ball and being grounded in something.

2. 2
   adjectivein compounds

   Having a bottom of some specified type.

   The glass-bottomed boat let tourists watch the reef passing below.

   Chemists heat their solutions in round-bottomed flasks.

   Note

   An adjective that never stands alone. It needs a word in front of it to say what the bottom is like, as in the cane-bottomed chairs of George Orwell's Burmese Days (1934). It is built from bottom plus -ed, the same pattern as long-legged or blue-eyed. It is hyphenated to its modifier and does not compare: nothing is more cane-bottomed than something else.

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