breathed

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of breathe.

   The diver breathed steadily through the regulator during the descent.

   Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back clear.

   Note

   One form does double duty here. It stands alone as the simple past (she breathed deeply) and follows have or be in perfect and passive constructions (the air had been breathed before). It also keeps both of breathe's patterns: intransitive (breathed steadily) and transitive, with an object for what is drawn in or let out (breathed a sigh). The adjectives spelled the same way are a separate word, built on the noun breath rather than on this verb.

2. 2
   adjectivein compounds

   Having a specified kind of breath, the quality named by a preceding modifier.

   The garlic-breathed clerk apologized as he leaned across the counter.

   A wine-breathed gentleman stumbled past the gate near midnight.

   Note

   A combining form that never stands alone. A modifier in front supplies the kind of breath, and a hyphen joins the two: well-breathed, bad-breathed, garlic-breathed. The breath can mean stamina as easily as smell. Walter Scott's well-breathed minstrel of 1831 has wind enough to recite for a month. Because it is a fixed description, it takes no more or most.

3. 3
   adjective

   Voiceless; produced without vibration of the vocal cords, in contrast to a voiced sound.

   In English, the consonant in 'fan' is breathed, whereas the one in 'van' is voiced.

   Linguists mark the breathed stops with a small diacritic.

   Similarvoiceless, unvoiced

   Oppositevoiced

   Note

   Phonetics sorts consonants and vowels into pairs by what the larynx does. In a breathed sound the vocal folds are held apart, so air passes through the open glottis without setting them vibrating. Breathed and voiced sounds can share every other feature, as the f of fan and the v of van do. Voiceless names the same class by what is missing; breathed names it by what does flow, which is air rather than voice.

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