knifed

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of knife.

   The mugger knifed his victim before fleeing the scene.

   Two sailors were knifed during the brawl on deck.

   Note

   One spelling serves both the simple past (she knifed him) and the participle after have or be (he had been knifed). Beyond literal cutting and stabbing, the verb carries a political sense of betrayal, especially of a party's own slate, and a social one of pointedly ignoring someone, much like cut. A candidate knifed by colleagues has been betrayed, not wounded.

   The senator was knifed by his own party when the slate was drawn up.

   Half the ticket had been knifed by precinct bosses before election day.

2. 2
   adjective

   Bearing a wound from having been cut or stabbed with a knife.

   The knifed prisoner was carried out of the cell on a stretcher.

   Paramedics stabilized the knifed pedestrian before the ambulance arrived.

   Note

   Not every knifed body is a crime victim. The Bulletin of the Bureau of Agricultural Intelligence and of Plant-Diseases (1911) sets knifed lambs against seared ones, so there the cut is a farm procedure compared with burning. In ordinary prose, though, the word points straight to violence, as in John Hale's The Fort (1973), where the knifed man lies holding his side. It is an either-or adjective and never takes more or most.

3. 3
   adjectivein compounds

   Carrying or wearing a knife of the kind stated, usually in compounds such as long-knifed or sharp-knifed.

   Two long-knifed deckhands waited on the pier to gut the morning's catch.

   The novel opens with a sharp-knifed bandit stepping out of the brush at dusk.

   Note

   Here the knife is something carried, and a word in front usually says what kind: long-knifed, sharp-knifed. The compound is hyphenated before a noun (a long-knifed rowdy) and has a storytelling, literary ring. Without that word, context has to do the work. A killer described as knifed by Stanton A. Coblentz (1968) is plainly armed, but a knifed guard would sound wounded, because the stabbed meaning pulls the bare word toward injury.

4. 4
   adjectivein compounds

   Having a blade of a specified type or shape.

   The double-knifed reaper harvested two rows in a single pass.

   A serrated-knifed saw worked better on the dense timber.

   Similarbladed

   Note

   The knife has moved from the hand to the object. What is described is a tool or weapon whose blade is of a certain kind, such as a short-knifed wheat header, long-knifed cutlasses or long-knifed bayonets. It belongs to the language of machinery and arms. Unlike the knife-carrying sense, which describes the person holding a blade, this one describes the thing that has a blade built in.

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