cocked

1. 1
   verb

   Past tense and past participle of cock.

   She cocked an eyebrow at the suggestion but said nothing.

   The officer had already cocked the pistol when the order to stand down came.

   Note

   After be, the participle shades into an adjective: a pistol that has been cocked is simply a cocked pistol, the firearms adjective, and a die landing on a tilt is cocked in the dice sense. In British and Irish slang the verb also means to copulate with or, like fuck, to ruin, which gives cocked a coarse second reading there.

2. 2
   adjective

   Of a firearm or crossbow, having the cock raised or otherwise set ready to be fired.

   The hunter kept his cocked rifle pointed at the ground until the deer stepped into the clearing.

   A cocked crossbow can fire with only a light touch on the trigger.

   Note

   Cocking is the step that stores energy so a light pull on the trigger can release it. On a gun the hammer or striker is drawn back against a spring; on a crossbow the string is pulled back until it catches. A weapon can be loaded and still not cocked, so the two words describe different stages of readiness and are not interchangeable.

3. 3
   adjectivecolloquial

   Under the influence of alcohol; drunk.

   After six rounds of tequila, Mark was totally cocked and singing on the table.

   They got cocked at the wedding and had to take a cab home.

   Similardrunk, wasted, plastered, hammered, smashed

   Oppositesober

4. 4
   adjective

   Of a die, having landed tilted at an angle rather than lying flat.

   One of the dice came to rest cocked against the rulebook, and the whole table argued over whether it counted.

   Under our house rules, any cocked die is picked up and thrown again.

   Similartilted

   Note

   Tabletop players need the word because a tilted die has no face pointing squarely up, so no number clearly counts. It usually happens when something interrupts the roll, such as the rim of a tray, a book or another die, and many groups agree before play whether a cocked throw is rolled again.

5. 5
   adjectivevulgarin compounds

   In compounds, having a penis of a stated form, or a stated number of penises.

   The novel's swaggering, big-cocked hero spends most of the plot picking fights.

   The comedian mocked small-cocked men who buy giant trucks to make up for it.

   Note

   The word almost never stands alone here: it is the back half of a compound adjective, hyphenated before a noun, as in a big-cocked hero or a large-cocked man. The register is vulgar throughout. It belongs to insults, crude comedy and explicit writing, and anywhere else even a playful use reads as coarse, so a careful writer reaches for it only on purpose.

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