knuckled

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of knuckle.

   After months of resistance, the committee knuckled under to public pressure.

   She had knuckled down to her studies long before the exams began.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs here and also matches the adjective for knuckle shapes. As a verb, it can be passive only in the transitive senses: rubbing with the knuckles, or the slang sense of punching (he was knuckled in the ribs). The others, including bending the fingers, touching the forehead and figurative yielding, are intransitive. Those appear only in active forms: they knuckled, they had knuckled.

2. 2
   adjectivein compounds

   Having knuckles of a particular or distinctive kind.

   The sculptor's knuckled hands betrayed decades of working with stone.

   He admired the firm, knuckled grip of the old climbing instructor.

   Note

   A compound-maker more than a free-standing adjective: built from knuckle plus -ed, it usually follows a word that names the kind, as in white-knuckled or bony-knuckled. Before a noun the pair takes a hyphen (a bony-knuckled fist). Used alone, as in knuckled hands, it relies on context to say what is distinctive. It does not take degrees, so nothing is more knuckled than another.

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