stepped

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of step.

   He stepped carefully across the icy footbridge at dawn.

   The hikers stepped over fallen branches scattered along the trail.

   Note

   One spelling does the work of both the past tense and the participle: he stepped, he has stepped. The final p doubles before -ed, as in stop and drop. Most uses are intransitive and lean on a preposition (stepped across, stepped over), so a passive is unusual. Only the transitive sense of setting the foot down takes an object. Before a noun, the form usually belongs to the "built in tiers" adjective.

2. 2
   adjective

   Built with a series of flat offsets resembling stairs, each part set back or raised from the one before it.

   Like the tiers of a wedding cake, each layer set back from the one beneath it.

   The architect designed a stepped facade that rose in distinct tiers.

   Ancient builders in Mesoamerica favored stepped pyramids over smooth-sided ones.

   Similartiered, terraced

   Note

   The word belongs to machinery as much as to building: a stepped key, a stepped gear, and the cars with stepped floors on the cliff railways that Railway Magazine described in 1951. The adjective is not comparable, so nothing is "more stepped" than something else. An adverb can still say how sharply the levels rise, as in steeply stepped stairs.

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