owned

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of own.

   Her family owned the farmland for nearly a century.

   The building had been owned by the city until last year.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs, and the surrounding words tell them apart. Standing alone it is a finite past (her family owned the farm); after have or be it is a participle in a perfect or passive (had been owned). The participle also carries own's slang meanings of defeating or embarrassing someone and of seizing root access to a computer, so a passive like the server was owned can mean taken over, not possessed.

2. 2
   adjectivein compounds

   Having an owner who belongs to a specified group, such as a family, nation, or community.

   The report focused on minority-owned firms competing for federal contracts.

   Foreign-owned banks now control a large share of the market.

   Similarcontrolled, run

   Note

   It works only as the back half of a compound, attached by a hyphen to a noun naming the owners: black-owned, woman-owned, investor-owned, member-owned. Business and news writing lean on it to classify firms by who holds them, as in an investor-owned utility. It does not take degrees, so one company cannot be more member-owned than another, and unlike the past-tense verb it never takes an object.

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