faced

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of face.

   The mayor faced angry questions at the town meeting.

   They have faced setbacks before and recovered quickly.

   Note

   Face is a regular verb, so one spelling covers both the simple past (she faced the crowd) and the participle of perfect and passive forms (they have faced worse). The passive is where it is most useful: faced with a choice, faced with the facts. This is the participle of the 'confronted with' meaning. Keep it apart from the combining adjective in cream-faced, which describes a face rather than an action.

2. 2
   adjectivein compounds

   Having a specified number or type of faces or flat surfaces.

   A cube is a six-faced solid with equal square sides.

   The sculptor carved a stern, square-faced figure from the marble.

   Note

   It almost never stands alone. It is the second half of a compound, and the first half does the describing. Shakespeare's Macbeth hurls 'cream-faced loon' at a man, Walt Whitman addresses a 'tan-faced prairie-boy', and Siegfried Sassoon's 'smug-faced crowds' of 1918 turn the form to scorn. As these show, the compound often judges a person through their face. It does not take more or most.

3. 3
   adjectiveslang

   Drunk, usually to a heavy or extreme degree from alcohol.

   They came home totally faced after the wedding reception.

   She was too faced to remember how the night ended.

   Similardrunk, wasted, hammered, smashed, plastered

   Oppositesober

   Note

   It is a clipping of the cruder shit-faced, and it keeps that word's sense of drinking well past tipsy. It is slang, at home in casual talk about a night out (got faced, totally faced) and out of place in anything formal. Because it shares its spelling with the everyday past tense of face, context does the work: 'we faced the crowd' and 'we got faced' are different words.

4. 4
   adjective

   Having the outer surface finished, or the front trimmed with a different material for decoration, as on a garment.

   The bodice is faced with silk to hide the inner seams.

   The lobby walls are marble-faced, giving the entry a grand look.

   Similartrimmed, clad, edged

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