elbowed

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of elbow.

   The crowd elbowed forward as the doors finally opened.

   By midday she had elbowed every competitor out of the race.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs here, as with any regular verb: she elbowed forward (simple past) and she had elbowed forward (participle after have). The verb covers a literal push or blow with the elbow and an informal workplace meaning: forcing someone out of a job so another person can be hired. With out, the physical shove turns figurative, as in elbowed out of the race or elbowed out of the post.

2. 2
   adjectivecolloquialidiomatic

   Boldly assertive and pushy, behaving in a way meant to gain an advantage over others.

   The columnist described the executive's sharp-elbowed rise through the ranks.

   A sharp-elbowed negotiating posture left the smaller firms with no room to maneuver.

   Similarpushy, aggressive, assertive

   Note

   A clipped sharp-elbowed: the sharp drops away, but the jostling stays. It can describe what people produce as well as the people themselves. Aziz Huq, writing in 2025, calls certain judicial opinions "such elbowed writings." Because the same adjective can simply mean the "bent" meaning, the surrounding words have to signal the figurative reading. It belongs to informal prose.

3. 3
   adjective

   Having one or more bends or corners.

   The drainage system relied on several elbowed sections to navigate the foundation.

   An elbowed bracket held the shelf against the slanted wall.

   Similarangled, bent, crooked

   Oppositestraight

   Note

   The adjective is built on elbow's broad meaning of any angular turn, such as the bend of a wall, a coastline or a pipe fitting. Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) uses it for a whaling lance twisted out of true: "this once long lance, now wildly elbowed." It does not take more or most. Something is elbowed or it is not, so an adverb like wildly does the work of saying how badly.

4. 4
   adjectivein compounds

   Having an elbow or elbows of a specified kind, as in bony-elbowed or bent-elbowed.

   The illustration showed a gaunt, knobby-elbowed scarecrow leaning on its pole.

   The coach kept correcting the bent-elbowed swing of her youngest golfer.

   Note

   This form rarely stands alone. It is the second half of a compound adjective, hyphenated to the word that says what kind of elbow is meant: bony-elbowed, knobby-elbowed, bent-elbowed. Most of these stay literal and describe a body or a posture. Sharp-elbowed is the one that left the body behind and became the "pushy" meaning.

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