contrasted

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of contrast.

   The article contrasted this year's budget with last year's spending.

   Reviewers contrasted the novel's quiet opening with its violent ending.

   Note

   One spelling does two verb jobs and shades into adjectives. Used transitively, it takes an object and usually a partner introduced by with: critics contrasted his early style with his late one. Used intransitively, it needs no object at all: the two colors contrasted sharply. Once it accepts more and most (more contrasted), it has crossed into the "contrasty" adjective, which describes a picture or scene rather than an act of comparing.

2. 2
   adjective

   Placed in opposition so that the differences between two or more things become clear.

   The contrasted approaches of the two teams produced very different results.

   Reviewers praised the sharply contrasted characters in the novel.

   Similardiffering, opposed, opposing, divergent, distinct

   Oppositesimilar, alike

3. 3
   adjective

   Showing or marked by strong contrast, as an image with bold differences between light and dark.

   The editor chose a highly contrasted print with deep blacks and stark whites.

   A strongly contrasted screen can be hard on the eyes in a dark room.

   Similarstark

   Oppositeflat, soft, muted

   Note

   Here the contrast lives inside one thing rather than between two. It suits prints and screens, but it reaches further. Colin Jones's The Great Nation (2002) calls Brittany one of France's most heavily contrasted regions, meaning a region full of internal differences. It grades freely with intensifiers such as highly, heavily and most, and contrasty is its close synonym. The side-by-side sense, by contrast, needs at least two things.

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