picked

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of pick.

   He picked a fight with the wrong stranger.

   The committee picked her proposal over three others.

   Note

   One regular -ed form does both jobs: the plain past (she picked the apples) and, after have or be, the perfect and the passive (the apples were picked at dawn). Which pick is meant comes from the object. Fruit is harvested, a splinter is worked out, and a candidate or a fight is chosen. Used before a noun, the participle becomes the "chosen" adjective.

2. 2
   adjective

   Chosen or selected, especially as the best for a particular purpose.

   The general led a picked force of his finest soldiers.

   Only picked candidates advanced to the final interview.

   Similarselect, chosen, selected, elite

3. 3
   adjective

   Having a pick, or a particular number or type of pick.

   The smith forged a picked mattock for the quarry crew.

   A two-picked tool gives better grip on hard ground.

   Note

   Mostly met as the second half of a compound, such as two-picked, where the number or kind of pick is the point. Any sense of pick will serve, from the quarryman's tool onward, so the surrounding words decide which pick is meant. Keep it apart from the "chosen" sense, which shares the spelling but none of the meaning.

4. 4
   adjective

   Played by plucking the strings of an instrument rather than strumming or bowing them.

   The song opens with a delicate picked guitar line.

   His picked banjo part drives the whole tune forward.

   Similarplucked

   Note

   A player's word that names a technique rather than an instrument, so one guitar can carry picked and strummed parts in the same song. It usually sits before the noun: a picked line, a picked banjo part. Because the strings are sounded one at a time, a picked part tends to be heard as a line of melody rather than a wash of chords.

5. 5
   adjective

   Having a pike or spine on the back, as in certain fishes.

   The picked dogfish defends itself with the spines set before its dorsal fins.

   Fishermen learned to grip the picked specimen well away from its back.

   Similarspiny

   Note

   A naturalist's adjective that survives mainly in the fish name picked dogfish. The pick here is a pike in its old sense of a spike. That makes it close kin to the obsolete "pointed" meaning rather than to choosing. In a fresh description of an animal, spined or spiny is the safer choice.

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