earned

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of earn.

   The team earned its first championship after a grueling season.

   Over the years she had earned the trust of every colleague.

   Note

   One -ed spelling serves both past tense and participle: she earned it, she has earned it, it was earned. The form carries both strands of earn: merit won by effort (earned the trust of colleagues) and pay received whether deserved or not (earned a salary). Context decides which. It is also the past of an archaic British dialect verb meaning to curdle milk in cheesemaking.

2. 2
   adjective

   Of media coverage: not paid for, appearing on its own merits because it drew genuine interest or attention.

   Like a restaurant becoming popular through word of mouth rather than billboards.

   The product launch generated significant earned media when reviewers praised it independently.

   Small startups often rely on earned publicity rather than expensive ad campaigns.

   Similarorganic, unpaid

   Oppositepaid

   Note

   A marketer's term for coverage nobody bought: press stories, reviews and social sharing that a brand wins by being worth talking about. It usually travels with paid and owned media, and it is all-or-nothing, so nothing is more earned than something else. Larry Kelley and Kim Sheehan's Advertising Media Planning (2015) calls it "free" in scare quotes: clients are not billed for the placement, but the attention still has to be won.

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