trunked

1. 1
   verb

   Past tense and past participle of trunk.

   The city trunked its police and fire radios onto a shared set of channels.

   Calls from the three branch offices are trunked over a single high-capacity link.

   Note

   Network engineering keeps the verb busy: users, calls or branch offices are trunked onto a shared set of circuits or channels, so a city that trunked its radios gave many units a few frequencies to share, and the radio-system adjective describes networks built that way. Mining has a sense of its own, ores trunked out of their slimes by running them through a trunk. The verb is regular.

2. 2
   adjectivein compounds

   Having a trunk of a particular kind; used in combinations such as large-trunked.

   Smooth-trunked eucalyptus trees lined both sides of the road.

   The artist painted a hillside of twisted-trunked olive trees.

   Note

   The compound can describe either kind of trunk, a tree's or an elephant's, and only the noun that follows tells which: large-trunked trees, a two-trunked elephant. The first half gives size, shape, texture or number, as in smooth-trunked or twisted-trunked, and the whole compound is hyphenated before its noun. It does not take more or most.

3. 3
   adjective

   Describing a two-way radio system in which a control channel automatically hands out free frequencies from a shared pool to groups of users as they need them.

   A trunked system lets dozens of talk groups share a handful of frequencies.

   The county replaced its old conventional radios with a trunked network for all emergency services.

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