sharked

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of shark.

   The swindler sharked investors out of millions before fleeing the country.

   She realized too late that the broker had sharked her entire pension.

   Note

   One regular -ed spelling covers several quite different verbs. The swindling senses (to steal, to cheat, to live by shifts and stratagems) are obsolete, so sharked meaning 'defrauded' now reads as period language. In UK student slang it means having had a fling with a fresher, which is mildly derogatory. Rarely, it simply means went fishing for sharks.

2. 2
   adjective

   Infested with sharks; full of sharks in numbers that make the area dangerous.

   Like a field overrun with wasps: you tread carefully or stay away entirely.

   Sailors gave the sharked channel a wide berth on every voyage.

   Lifeguards posted warnings along the sharked stretch of coastline.

   Note

   An adjective built straight from the noun, the way wooded is built from wood. It is not a form of the verb's past tense. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) speaks of "the heathenish sharked waters." Waters are either sharked or they are not. The word takes no comparison, so "more sharked" sounds wrong, and it sits naturally before its noun.

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