disputed

1. 1
   adjective

   Not settled or accepted, because people argue over whether it is true, correct, or valid.

   The disputed election results triggered weeks of protest.

   Historians have long debated these disputed details of the treaty.

   Similarcontested, controversial, debatable, questionable, unresolved

   Oppositeundisputed, accepted, settled, uncontested

   Note

   An adjective that takes degrees: a claim can be more disputed than another, the most disputed of all, or widely disputed. James Lambert, writing in 2018, calls the etymology of Japlish "disputed and contentiously so," a reminder that the word on its own only says agreement is missing. To show how fierce the quarrel is, add an intensifier or a tag like his.

2. 2
   verb

   Past tense and past participle of dispute.

   The neighbors disputed the property line for years.

   The findings were disputed by several independent researchers.

   Note

   A regular verb: dispute simply adds -d, and one spelling serves as both past and participle. Most uses of dispute take an object (a claim, a will, a result), so the participle readily forms passives, and these shade into the adjective for contested claims. The intransitive sense, arguing in general, gives only active forms: they disputed for hours. An older meaning, "to resist," is obsolete.

3. 3
   adjective

   Claimed by more than one sovereign state as rightfully its own.

   The disputed region has been claimed by both nations since the war.

   Fishing rights in the disputed waters remain a source of tension.

   Similarcontested

   Oppositeundisputed, uncontested

   Note

   Here the argument is over ground rather than truth. The word is applied to territory, and the claimants are states. It differs from the general "contested" sense because the facts need not be uncertain at all: the land or water is plainly there, and the quarrel is over who rightfully holds it. It sits most naturally before nouns such as region, territory, border and waters.

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