ordered

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of order.

   The general ordered the troops to retreat before dawn.

   We had ordered the materials weeks before they finally arrived.

   Note

   One spelling serves both the past tense (she ordered coffee) and the past participle (the coffee had been ordered). The object usually shows which meaning of the verb is in play. A person ordered to leave was commanded, a part ordered from a supplier was requested, and a list ordered by date was arranged. That last use shades into the "tidy" adjective.

2. 2
   adjective

   Arranged neatly and kept tidy, with things in their proper places.

   His ordered study, with every book shelved by subject, impressed visitors.

   She much prefers an ordered workspace to a cluttered one.

   Similarorderly, tidy, neat, organized

   Oppositeuntidy, messy, cluttered, disordered

   Note

   Tidiness can describe people as well as rooms. In Phil McNulty's 2011 BBC report on England's 2–2 draw with Switzerland, the Swiss looked "the more composed and ordered" side, meaning disciplined and well organized in their shape. The word is gradable (more ordered, most ordered), and it pairs naturally with composed when it describes a group's conduct rather than its furniture.

3. 3
   adjective

   Having a partial or total order that, in some technical sense, respects the object's algebraic structure where such structure exists.

   The real numbers form an ordered field, since the order works smoothly with addition and multiplication.

   Every ordered group carries an order relation that respects its operation.

   Note

   A mathematician's adjective that almost always comes attached to a noun: ordered set, ordered group, ordered field. The order must survive the operations. If a lies below b, adding the same element to both keeps a below b, and in a field, multiplying by a positive element does too. For a bare set with no operations, ordered simply means an order has been chosen for it.

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