piled

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past tense and past participle of pile.

   Snow piled against the doorway overnight.

   The workers had piled the crates against the warehouse wall.

   Note

   A regular -ed form, so one spelling serves as the simple past (snow piled against the door) and as the past participle, after have in perfect tenses and after be in the passive. The verb works both ways: you pile things up, or things pile up on their own. The passive often takes with, as in a table piled with papers, carrying the sense of loading or overfilling.

2. 2
   adjective

   Having a pile or nap: a surface of raised threads or fibers, as on velvet or carpet.

   The richly piled velvet caught the lamplight beautifully.

   A finely piled towel absorbs water more readily than a flat-woven one.

   Similarnapped

   Note

   The textile sense comes from pile as the raised surface of a fabric, not the point of the weapon sense. It readily takes a number or an adverb in front. Henry Hart Milman's Fazio (1816) has three-piled velvet, where the compound grades the cloth by its pile. Today richly piled or deep-piled is more likely than the numbered form.

3. 3
   adjective

   Having a pile, or point, at the end; ending in a sharp tip.

   Meges threw a spear well piled.

   [1611?], Homer, The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets

   Similarpointed

   Note

   Here pile means the point of a weapon, so a spear is piled when it carries its head. Chapman's translation of the Iliad places the word after its noun with well: Meges threw "a spear well piled." A modern reader will hear the heaped-up meaning instead. The word is for recognizing in older verse and translation rather than for use in new writing.

4. 4
   adjective

   Of iron or steel, formed from a pile or fagot, produced by forge-welding a stacked bundle of bars into a single mass.

   Victorian engineers trusted piled iron for its toughness under load.

   The restorer confirmed the railings were piled wrought iron, not cast.

   Note

   An ironworks term, usually met in the phrase piled iron. The pile, also called a fagot, is a stack of wrought-iron bars that is reheated, welded into one mass and then rolled. Repeated piling spreads out the slag and refines the fibrous grain of the finished metal. The adjective stands before its noun and does not take degrees: iron is piled or it is not.

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