precedented

1. 1
   adjectiverare

   Backed up by an earlier case or example, and therefore not new or unusual.

   Like a recipe a cook has made many times before: nothing about it is surprising.

   The court found the appeal precedented and cited a ruling from the previous decade.

   We have a right to take any method that is legal and is precedented.

   1905, George Pierce Baker, Henry Barrett Huntington

   Similarestablished, familiar, customary

   Oppositeunprecedented, novel, unheard-of, new

   Note

   A lawyer's word that may have been built backward: it dates from about 1650 and is possibly a back-formation from unprecedented, a positive coined to answer the negative. In legal argument it pairs naturally with legal, as in George Pierce Baker and Henry Barrett Huntington's The Principles of Argumentation (1905): any method "that is legal and is precedented." Because it is rare, it reads as a deliberate reply to a claim of novelty.

2. 2
   verbrare

   Simple past tense and past participle of precedent.

   "Is 'precedented' even a word?" you may ask. Well, it is now, Noah-fucking-Webster. I just precedented it.

   2005, Stephen Colbert, “So You Want To Be A Precedent”

   Note

   The verb behind this form is itself rare. Precedent, meaning to be or provide a precedent for, takes a direct object, so this form appears either with an object ("earlier rulings precedented the doctrine") or in the passive ("had been precedented by"). It shares its spelling with the legal adjective. Stephen Colbert's America The Book (2005) jokes about how unfamiliar it looks, declaring mock-defiantly, "I just precedented it."

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