shored

1. 1
   verb

   Past participle of shore.

   The crumbling embankment was shored against the rising river.

   Workers had shored the old gallery before the survey began.

   Note

   A regular past participle: it follows have in perfect tenses and be in the passive. The particle sets the shade. Shored alone means given support, as with a wall or an embankment. Shored up usually means reinforced against failure, as with a business or a defense. Don't mistake it for shore, an old past tense of shear. The two only look related.

   Emergency funding shored up the struggling hospital.

   The board had shored up its finances before the merger.

2. 2
   adjective

   Bordered by a shore, often of a kind specified by the word it is combined with.

   The fjord is a steep-shored inlet carved by ancient ice.

   Gently-shored lakes are far easier for young swimmers to enter.

   Note

   An adjective built from the noun, not the verb: shore in the sense of a coast, plus the -ed that means "having one," as in walled or bearded. It does its work in hyphenated compounds such as rocky-shored straits and a sandy-shored cove, and it has no comparative form. It shares its spelling with the propping-up verb form, which comes from a different shore altogether.

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