protected

1. 1
   adjective

   Guarded and kept safe from harm, attack, or potential damage.

   Ships shelter here because the harbor lies in a protected bay.

   Endangered cranes enjoy protected status across the whole region.

   Similarsafe, sheltered, secure, guarded, shielded

   Oppositeunprotected, exposed, vulnerable

   Note

   This adjective can be graded, and that is what separates it from the past-tense verb. A place can be more protected than its neighbors, or the most protected of all, but a simple past like "the walls protected them" cannot take more or most. So when you can add a degree word, you are using the adjective.

2. 2
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of protect.

   The thick walls protected the villagers from raiders for centuries.

   The witness was protected by police officers throughout the trial.

   Note

   Airline jargon hides in this form. Besides keeping something safe, protect has a reservations meaning: an agent books a passenger on a later flight as a fallback, in case they cannot board the one they reserved. A stranded traveler may therefore be protected on the evening departure. That use has nothing to do with defense, though it shares the spelling with the gradable adjective.

3. 3
   adjective

   Marked with the access modifier that lets subclasses use a program element while keeping it hidden from the rest of the program.

   The base class declares a protected field that its subclasses inherit and modify.

   Keeping the helper method protected hides it from outside code but lets subclasses override it.

   Note

   A programmer's keyword turned adjective: protected is the access modifier itself, written in the code and applied usually to a variable or a method. The declaring class and any subclass that inherits from it can reach such a member. Unrelated code elsewhere in the program cannot. When choosing it, the question to ask is who will extend the class, not who will merely call it.

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