inched

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of inch.

   The climbers inched along the narrow mountain ledge.

   Mortgage rates inched higher over the past week.

   Note

   A regular verb, so one spelling covers both jobs: they inched along the ledge, and rates have inched higher. It usually travels with a word of direction (along, forward, higher, closer) because it describes slow progress toward somewhere. It can also take an object, as in inched the car forward, meaning to move something by small degrees, or to hand something out sparingly.

2. 2
   adjectivenonstandardin compounds

   Having a length equal to a specified number of inches.

   He fitted a three-inched bolt through the bracket.

   The display was a slim ten-inched screen mounted on the wall.

   Note

   An adjective that lives only at the end of a measurement compound, hyphenated before its noun: a three-inched bolt, a ten-inched screen. It is nonstandard, and in careful writing the bare unit does the job, as in a three-inch bolt. Although it shares a spelling with the verb's past form, nothing here has crept along. The -ed simply turns the measurement into a describing word, and it is never compared.

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