parted

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of part.

   The old friends parted at the station after years together.

   The heavy curtains parted to reveal a brightly lit stage.

   Note

   One spelling does double duty. Alone it is the simple past (they parted). With an auxiliary it is the participle (they had parted, the crowd was parted). The verb behind it runs both ways: transitive when someone parts curtains or hair, intransitive when friends part or clouds do. An older use, dividing something up into shares, is now archaic and sounds deliberately old-fashioned.

2. 2
   adjective

   Separated or taken apart, with the pieces no longer touching.

   The parted strands of the rope lay loose across the deck.

   Through the parted clouds, the moon lit the open field.

   Similarseparated, divided, split

3. 3
   adjectivein compounds

   Composed of a stated number of separate sections or divisions, as named by a numeric prefix.

   The diagram divided the design into a four-parted grid of equal squares.

   Folk singers preserved a three-parted ballad with a repeating refrain.

   Note

   A combining form that needs a number in front of it: three-parted, four-parted. It is hyphenated to that number and does not stand on its own in this meaning. Used alone, the word reads as the plain "separated" sense. It also takes no degrees, because a design is four-parted or it is not.

4. 4
   adjective

   Cut so deeply into lobes that the divisions reach nearly to the base or midrib.

   The herbarium specimen showed a deeply parted leaf with five narrow lobes.

   Botanists described the foliage as parted, with clefts running close to the midrib.

   Note

   Botanists use the word for a precise depth of incision. In a parted leaf the clefts run almost to the base or midrib, deeper than in a merely cleft one, yet the blade still holds together as a single leaf. That last point is the test: once the pieces separate into distinct leaflets, the leaf is compound, not parted.

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