sugared

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of sugar.

   He sugared the strawberries and left them to soften overnight.

   The pastries were sugared and set out on trays to cool.

   Note

   Here sugared is the regular past form of a mostly transitive verb. You can sugar strawberries, or you can sugar bad news to make it seem less unpleasant, and the past form is the same for both. Regionally in Canada and the US, it pairs with off for the last stage of maple-sugar making: boiling the syrup down until it is thick enough to crystallize.

   By evening the syrup had sugared off and was ready to pour into molds.

   She sugared the bad news so gently that nobody complained.

2. 2
   adjective

   Made with or containing sugar, used of food or drink.

   She prefers sugared tea to the bitter, unsweetened kind.

   The recipe calls for a lightly sugared crust on top of the pie.

   Similarsugary

   Oppositeunsweetened

3. 3
   adjectivefiguratively

   Sweet and pleasant, especially of words, tone, or manner.

   Like a tune so smooth and sweet you forget to listen to the words.

   The diplomat spoke in sugared tones throughout the tense meeting.

   Beneath the sugared phrases lay an unmistakable threat.

   Similarhoneyed, sweet, syrupy, saccharine

   Oppositeharsh, blunt

   Note

   The figurative sense often carries a warning: sweetness laid over something less pleasant. In William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (c. 1593), a listener is told he "attended to their sugred words, / But lookt not on the poison of their hearts." The collocation still works that way. Sugared words, sugared tones and sugared phrases praise a pleasant surface while hinting at what lies beneath it.

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