educated

1. 1
   adjective

   Having reached a high level of schooling, such as a college degree.

   An educated electorate is essential to a functioning democracy.

   She is well educated and travels widely for her research.

   Similarliterate, learned, cultured, knowledgeable

   Oppositeuneducated, illiterate, ignorant, unschooled

   Note

   An adjective formed from educate plus -ed that has become a quality a person can have in degrees: more educated, most educated. That gradability separates it from the verb form, which reports an act of teaching. The adjective names the result, a lasting trait of the person, so it can be compared and modified in ways the plain participle usually is not.

2. 2
   adjective

   Based on relevant information or knowledge rather than pure guesswork.

   Analysts offered an educated guess about next quarter's sales.

   Rather than choose at random, she made an educated decision grounded in the data.

   Similarinformed, reasoned, considered

   Oppositewild, random, uninformed, blind

   Note

   Here the knowledge belongs to the judgment, not to a person: information has shaped the guess. Its home is the fixed phrase an educated guess, an estimate made on some grounds rather than none. It extends naturally to other products of reasoning, such as an educated answer to a multiple-choice question, and it sits before its noun.

3. 3
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of educate.

   The monastery educated boys from across the region.

   She was educated at a small school in the countryside.

   Note

   The verb is transitive, so its participle turns passive easily: someone is educated at a school or by a teacher. As a past participle it builds perfect tenses with have and passives with be. As a simple past it stands alone as the finite verb. Oddly, educate itself once served as an adjective meaning "educated", a use now obsolete.

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