sweated

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of sweat.

   He sweated heavily as he climbed the steep trail.

   The horses had sweated after the long gallop home.

   Note

   One regular -ed form does both jobs: he sweated up the hill, the horses had sweated. Because sweat can also take an object, the participle turns passive easily. A horse is sweated by hard exercise, and workers are sweated by an employer who squeezes labor out of them. That informal sense of exploitation is the one that hardened into the sweatshop adjective.

2. 2
   adjective

   Marked by the long hours, very low pay, and poor surroundings typical of a sweatshop.

   The committee investigated the sweated trades of the city's garment district.

   Much of the clothing industry once relied on sweated labor in cramped tenements.

   Similarexploitative

   Note

   A word from the politics of work rather than the body: it describes trades and labor, not a person who has been perspiring. Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy (1920) sets "our own sweated trades" beside slave-run industry. In D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913), a woman asked "Is it sweated?" answers "More or less". The adjective works after a verb and takes degrees, so more sweated is possible.

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