natured

1. 1
   adjectivein compounds

   Having the disposition or temperament named by the modifying word it attaches to.

   The captain was famously even-natured, staying calm while everyone else panicked.

   Critics found the villain too cartoonishly ill-natured to feel believable.

   Similartempered

   Note

   Noun plus -ed, the same pattern behind -hearted and -minded: it means "having a nature of this kind" and needs a partner word to say which kind. It lives only inside compounds such as ill-natured, even-natured and good-natured, usually hyphenated. Standing alone, natured reads as a past tense of the verb instead, so the partner word is what makes it an adjective.

2. 2
   verbobsolete

   Simple past and past participle of nature.

   Note

   A regular verb form, with one spelling for both past tense and participle: it natured, it had natured, it was natured. The verb behind it, meaning to endow with natural qualities, is obsolete, so these forms suit older or deliberately old-fashioned prose. Keep it apart from the compound-forming adjective in ill-natured, which describes a temperament rather than reporting an action.

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