bounced

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of bounce.

   The check bounced because the account had no money in it.

   Sunlight bounced off the polished marble floor.

   Note

   One spelling serves as both simple past and past participle, formed regularly by adding -d to bounce. The verb is both intransitive and transitive, so the participle pairs with have in either use (the ball has bounced; she has bounced the baby on her knee). Only the transitive senses go passive: an idea is bounced off colleagues, but sunlight that bounced off marble was not bounced by anything.

2. 2
   adjective

   Of an email message: returned to the sender after the system failed to deliver it to the intended address.

   Half the newsletter list produced bounced replies from dead accounts.

   He kept getting a bounced notice every time he wrote to that old address.

   Similarreturned, undelivered

   Oppositedelivered

   Note

   Mail-system jargon in which the participle settles into an adjective: a bounced email, a bounced reply, a bounced notice. It sits before the noun. After the noun, the verb takes over (the message bounced), just as in the ordinary past tense. What comes back is an automated notice from the mail server, usually naming the cause: an invalid recipient, a full mailbox, or a filter that refused the message.

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