tyred

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of tyre.

   The blacksmith tyred the wagon wheels with heated iron bands.

   Once the rims had been tyred, the carriage rolled without a wobble.

   Note

   One spelling serves two verbs. The living one is transitive, so something is always tyred, whether a car fitted with rubber or a wagon wheel fitted with an iron band, and passives like "the wheels were tyred" come naturally. The other verb, meaning "to adorn," is obsolete, and it sits beside an equally obsolete noun tyre, "attire." In compounds such as rubber-tyred, the form works instead as the combining adjective.

2. 2
   adjectivein compounds

   Having a certain number or type of tire, as named by the word it combines with.

   The dual-tyred rear axle spread the load across more rubber.

   Balloon-tyred bicycles became popular for riding over soft ground.

   Note

   A combining adjective that rarely stands alone. It attaches to a number or a material and is hyphenated before the noun, as in rubber-tyred or dual-tyred. Built simply from tyre plus -ed, it cannot be graded: nothing is more rubber-tyred than another thing. Richard Foster's 2023 piece in RAIL shows its usual technical setting, a rubber-tyred gantry crane, where the compound names what the machine rolls on.

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