fevered

1. 1
   adjective

   Affected by a fever, or showing the heat and weakness that one brings.

   The fevered patient drifted in and out of restless sleep.

   He came home from the trip pale, fevered, and barely able to stand.

   Similarfeverish, febrile, flushed

2. 2
   adjective

   Heated and impassioned, with an enthusiasm so intense it borders on distraction.

   Investors traded at a fevered pace as the rumor spread across the floor.

   He scribbled page after page in a fevered burst of inspiration.

   Similarfeverish, frenzied, frantic, frenetic, heated

   Oppositecalm, leisurely, measured

   Note

   Here the heat of the illness sense has moved from the body to the mood of a crowd or the tone of an argument. It attaches readily to nouns of feeling and speech, such as fevered anticipation before a match or fevered rhetoric. It also grades naturally: Noam Chomsky, writing in Z Magazine in 2010, offers to restate a point "in less fevered rhetoric."

3. 3
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of fever. Rare as a verb; fevered is usually an adjective, as in a fevered brow.

   Note

   Behind the form stands a verb that works two ways. Transitively it means to put someone into a fever, and intransitively it means to become fevered. The tensed verb is now rare, so most readers meet this spelling as an adjective, either the medical one or its figurative partner. A phrase like fevered by anxiety sits on the border, and it reads as a participle when an agent follows with by.

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