retarded

1. 1
   mental disabilityadjectiveoffensivedated

   Having mental retardation, an older term for intellectual disability; mentally deficient or underdeveloped.

   Note

   The word was once the plain clinical term, and it appears without comment in older reporting, as in Tamar Lewin's article “As the Retarded Live Longer, Anxiety Grips Aging Parents” (1990). Doctors, teachers and families now say intellectual disability; the old word, and its fuller form mentally retarded, can wound even when meant clinically. Keep it for quotation and history.

2. 2
   very stupidadjectivederogatoryoffensivecolloquial

   An offensive way of calling a person, idea or thing extremely stupid or obtuse.

   Note

   The insult draws its sting from the old clinical label: calling a pun or a plan retarded likens it to people with intellectual disabilities, so it hurts them and their families even when no person is the target. Outside quotation, stupid, obtuse or ridiculous says the same thing without the slur.

3. 3
   adjective

   Delayed or held back, especially in development; hindered or impeded.

   A cold, wet spring caused retarded flowering across the whole orchard.

   The region's retarded economic development left it far behind its neighbors.

   Similardelayed, stunted

   Oppositeadvanced, accelerated

   Note

   This is the neutral sense the others grew from, and it lives on in science and medicine: retarded growth is growth that comes late. Because the word also carries the old clinical label and the insult, delayed or slowed is safer elsewhere, above all of people or places: William Watson's “culturally as retarded” (1971) would now read harshly.

4. 4
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of retard.

   High interest rates have retarded the recovery of the housing market.

   The engineers retarded the ignition to keep the engine from knocking.

   Note

   The verb takes an object and works in the passive: frost retarded the harvest; growth was retarded by drought. Used of things rather than people, it stays neutral, as when Arthur Conan Doyle writes that obscurity of style has retarded the recognition of really great writers. Two older uses, being slow and staying back, are obsolete.

5. 5
   physicsadjective

   Of a quantity describing an electromagnetic field, adjusted to allow for the finite speed at which radiation travels.

   Physicists use the retarded potential to find the field a moving charge produces at a distant point.

   The retarded time accounts for the delay between a charge's motion and the moment its field is felt elsewhere.

   Oppositeadvanced

   Note

   Physicists use it in a strictly neutral, technical sense: a retarded potential or field is calculated at the retarded time, the moment a signal traveling at light speed must have left the source to arrive at the point of interest now. Its counterpart is advanced, for solutions using a later time, which satisfy the same equations but are usually set aside.

Showing meanings only. Show all 6