marred

1. 1
   verb

   Past tense and past participle of mar.

   A long crack marred the otherwise flawless marble surface.

   The celebration was marred by a power outage halfway through.

   Note

   The workaday form, and nearly always the one a modern reader means. Mar is transitive, so marred takes an object in the past tense (a crack marred the surface). Very often it appears in the passive, as in an evening marred by rain or a record marred by one error. What is marred is left with a mar, a blemish. The r doubles before -ed because mar is one syllable ending in a single vowel and consonant.

2. 2
   adjectivedialectalYorkshire

   Spoiled and overly indulged; gone soft from having always been given one's own way.

   Like fruit left to ripen with no frost to toughen it.

   He called his nephew a marred child who had never known a day's hardship.

   Years of being doted on by everyone had left her thoroughly marred.

   Similarspoiled, pampered, coddled, indulged, cosseted

   Note

   A northern dialect word, used in Lancashire and Yorkshire, chiefly of a child: one who has been cosseted and indulged until gone soft. It descends from the same Old English participle as the obsolete "troubled" meaning. Outside those dialects, listeners will likely take it as "damaged," so it works best in dialogue or in speech reported from that region.

3. 3
   adjectiveobsolete

   Of a person, perplexed or troubled in mind; bewildered and ill at ease.

   Note

   A lost meaning with a deep root. Middle English marred described someone troubled, distressed, vexed or bewildered, and it goes back to an Old English participle of a verb meaning to hinder, obstruct or trouble. Here the thing obstructed is the mind. The sense is obsolete, so a modern reader will hear the everyday past tense of mar instead. In new writing, perplexed or troubled carries this meaning without the risk.

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