coursed

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of course.

   Adrenaline coursed through her body as the race began.

   The river coursed over the rocks below the waterfall.

   Note

   One regular -ed form does double duty. It serves as the simple past (blood coursed through his veins) and as the participle after have or be (the hare had been coursed). It most often describes liquid on the move, above all blood, and then it takes a preposition: coursed through, coursed down. Without a preposition it is transitive, as in streams coursed the valley or dogs coursed the hare. That hunting use lies behind the adjective for hunted quarry.

2. 2
   adjective

   Laid out in regular horizontal rows, as bricks or stones are arranged in a wall.

   Like a brick wall where every row sits flat and even on the one below.

   The builders preferred coursed masonry for its clean, repeating lines.

   Each layer of coursed stone sat flush against the one beneath it.

   Oppositeuncoursed

   Note

   A builder's and engineer's term, at home before stone nouns: coursed rubble, coursed ashlar, a coursed stone foundation. Its natural foil is broken ashlar, set beside it in Popular Mechanics Magazine of July 1915, or random rubble laid without level beds. Rankine's A Manual of Civil Engineering (1862) specifies coursed rubble for bridge wing-walls. As part of a compound modifier it takes a hyphen: a coursed-ashlar wall.

3. 3
   adjective

   Chased by hunters with dogs, as a hare driven before the pack.

   The coursed hare doubled back sharply to throw off the pursuing hounds.

   A coursed stag plunged into the river to shake off the pack.

   Similarhunted, chased

   Note

   Field sports keep coursed apart from hunted. Sighthounds such as greyhounds run down a coursed hare over open ground, while hounds follow a hunted one by scent. Writers on sport pair the two words, as in a coursed or hunted hare. In The Oriental Sporting Magazine, the dispute over whether a coursed fox's brush falls under the rules for a hunted fox turns on exactly that difference.

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