compensated

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of compensate.

   The airline compensated passengers whose flights were canceled.

   Each landowner was compensated before the highway was built.

   Note

   Compensate works with or without an object, and the past form shows both patterns. The airline compensated passengers, but a pilot compensated for the crosswind. In the passive, the person who is paid becomes the subject and the loss follows for: the owners were compensated for their land. Before a noun, the same spelling becomes the adjective for being paid.

2. 2
   adjective

   Having received payment for work, services rendered, or a loss incurred.

   Compensated jurors received a daily payment for their time in court.

   Every laid-off employee was fully compensated under the agreement.

   Similarpaid

   Oppositeunpaid, uncompensated, unremunerated

   Note

   Here the participle has settled into an adjective, and the sign is that it can be graded. The Service Contract Act: Prevailing Wage Resource Book 1998 worries about "a handful of very compensated employees." A verb form does not usually take very, but an adjective can. Placed before a noun, as in compensated jurors, it describes a status, while the past participle reports the act of paying.

3. 3
   adjective

   Adjusted to make up for some particular circumstance, so that its results stay accurate.

   A compensated pendulum keeps a constant rate despite changes in temperature.

   The instrument relies on a compensated circuit that corrects for voltage fluctuations.

   Note

   Engineers and economists put it before the thing whose behavior has been corrected: a compensated autopilot, or the compensated gold dollar of Irving Fisher's Stable Money (1934). In 1948 Gifford Bull still felt the term needed explaining, glossing it as an autopilot whose constants vary as the airplane's parameters vary. A quick test separates it from the "paid" meaning: a compensated person was paid; a compensated device or currency was adjusted.

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