cultivated

1. 1
   adjective

   Grown deliberately by people through farming or gardening, rather than occurring naturally in the wild.

   Cultivated blueberries are larger and sweeter than the small wild ones in the forest.

   Most of the herbs on grocery shelves are cultivated rather than foraged.

   Similardomesticated

   Oppositewild

2. 2
   adjective

   Showing refinement, good taste, and education in one's manner, speech, or interests.

   Her cultivated taste in music ranged from baroque opera to modern jazz.

   He spoke in the cultivated tones of someone raised among diplomats.

   Similarrefined, cultured, sophisticated, polished, educated

   Oppositeuncultured, unrefined, boorish, philistine

   Note

   Refinement pictured as something grown: a person, or their taste, voice or manners, tended the way a field is tended. It is gradable (more cultivated, most cultivated) and sits close to cultured and refined. A personal advertisement in Gay Community News in 1976 offers "attractive, cultivated" as a selling point, beside a love of music and literature. It is a compliment people are glad to claim for themselves.

3. 3
   adjective

   Of land, prepared and worked for growing crops; farmed rather than left wild.

   Only a small fraction of the region's cultivated acreage now produces wheat.

   Centuries of labor had turned the steep hillsides into cultivated terraces.

   Similartilled, arable

   Oppositeuncultivated, wild, fallow

4. 4
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of cultivate.

   The monks cultivated these hillsides for centuries.

   Over the years she has cultivated close ties with local leaders.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs: the simple past (the monks cultivated the hillsides) and the past participle. As a participle it takes have for perfect tenses and be for the passive (the land was cultivated). The verb runs from the literal, growing crops and working soil, to the figurative, where people cultivate friendships, ties or a following. That participle is also where the "refined" adjective comes from.

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