measured

1. 1
   verb

   Past tense and past participle of measure.

   The surveyor measured the boundary between the two properties.

   Rainfall was measured at three stations across the valley.

   Note

   One spelling covers both jobs of a regular verb: the simple past (she measured the room) and the participle (it has been measured). In the stative meaning, as in "the plank measured two meters," it describes size rather than an action and takes no passive. The participle also hardens into adjectives, from the "determined by measurement" sense to the "restrained" meaning.

2. 2
   adjective

   Done in a careful, controlled way, without haste or excess emotion.

   Like a chess player who weighs every move before touching a piece.

   The diplomat offered a measured response to the provocative question.

   He walked at a measured pace, never hurrying despite the deadline.

   Similarmoderate, reasonable, temperate, mild, sober

   Oppositehasty, hurried, rash, impulsive

   Note

   Here the control is in the manner: measured tones, a measured pace, carefully measured caution. Temperate and reasonable sit close, but measured keeps a hint of weighing each word or step. When Tennyson, in In Memoriam (1850), finds "a use in measured language," the phrase leans toward the metrical meaning: verse as a numbing, regular exercise. That line shows how near the two senses lie.

3. 3
   adjective

   Determined or recorded through the act of measurement.

   The measured weight differed slightly from the value printed on the label.

   Engineers logged the measured voltage at each point in the circuit.

   Similarrecorded, observed, actual

   Oppositeestimated

   Note

   Its home collocation is the measured mile: a distance actually marked out, not guessed at. Walter Besant's The Ivory Gate (1892) leans on that difference when Pembridge Square lies "four good measured miles" from Lincoln's Inn. Those are real miles, and every one is walked in a rage. The word sits before nouns of quantity, such as mile, weight or voltage, and it stands against estimated or nominal figures.

4. 4
   adjective

   Written rhythmically in meter, following a regular metrical pattern.

   The poet preferred measured verse to the looser rhythms of free composition.

   Each measured stanza followed the same arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables.

   Similarmetrical, metered, rhythmic

   Oppositefree

   Note

   Poetry owns this sense, but any steady rhythm can borrow it. R. S. McNaught's "From the Severn to the Mersey by Great Western" (1955) hears the measured tread of a guard pacing slowly toward his van. Those steps fall at an even beat, the way stressed syllables fall in a line of verse. Measured verse and metrical verse are near synonyms.

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