murdered

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of murder.

   The dictator murdered thousands of his own citizens.

   She was murdered by someone she trusted.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs. In he murdered his rival it stands alone as the past tense, while after has or was it is the participle that builds the perfect and the passive. The form carries the verb's figurative uses as well: a team murdered in the final lost heavily, and a singer who murdered a song botched it. Context, not form, tells killing from mangling.

2. 2
   adjective

   Having been the victim of murder; killed unlawfully and deliberately by another person.

   The murdered diplomat had received threats for months before his death.

   A small memorial now stands where the murdered protesters fell.

   Similarkilled

   Note

   Here the participle has settled into an adjective that sits before its noun: Rollo Ahmed's The Black Art (1936) speaks of accosting the soul of a murdered man in a burial ground at midnight. It cannot be graded, since no one is more murdered than another. It keeps the literal killing, while the looser "beaten" and "botched" uses stay with the verb form.

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