skulled

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of skull.

   She skulled the chip shot and sent it screaming across the green.

   The defender had skulled the striker accidentally during the scramble.

   Note

   One regular -ed form serves as both the past tense and the participle, so the surrounding words do the sorting: she skulled it, it had been skulled. The spelling also carries three different actions: a blow to someone's head, a mishit across the top of a ball, and a glass upended and drained. The object usually tells you which. Before a noun, skulled may instead be the adjective meaning having a skull.

2. 2
   adjectivein compounds

   Possessing a skull; having the bony structure that encloses and protects the brain.

   Paleontologists classified the fossil as a skulled vertebrate rather than a soft-bodied invertebrate.

   The newly described species is skulled, unlike its boneless relatives.

   Note

   It works mostly as the second half of a compound. In hard-skulled, the first element names the kind of skull, and that tells the reader more than the bare fact of having one. Standing alone, it belongs to careful descriptive or classifying prose. It is not comparable: a creature is skulled or it is not, so more skulled does not work.

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