worked

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of work.

   The crew worked through the night to fix the outage.

   He has worked at the same firm for thirty years.

   Note

   One regular spelling covers both jobs: the simple past (she worked late) and the participle in perfect and passive constructions (has worked, was worked). The prepositions that steer the verb carry straight over, so worked at a bank, worked as a nurse, worked for a firm and worked with colleagues each point to something different: the workplace, the job title, the employer, the people or tools alongside.

2. 2
   adjective

   Prepared with each step shown, so that the method needed to reach the answer is demonstrated.

   The study guide includes a worked example for each type of equation.

   Students learn faster from a worked problem than from the bare answer.

   Note

   A classroom adjective that sits before the thing being taught: a worked example, a worked problem. Taplin's Improved Edition of Walkingame's Tutor's (1835) already tells pupils to set each error beside its number "as in the worked example." It does not grade, so a problem is worked or it is not, never "more worked." Keep it apart from the "prepared by labor" sense, where the work is done on a material rather than shown to a learner.

3. 3
   adjective

   Shaped, processed, or prepared in a particular way through labor; wrought.

   The museum displayed tools of worked bronze from the Bronze Age.

   Blocks of worked stone formed the foundation of the ancient temple.

   Similarwrought, shaped, dressed, fashioned

   Oppositeraw, rough

   Note

   The craftsman's sense, standing beside the older wrought: worked steel, stone or bronze is material that hands or tools have shaped rather than left raw. It readily takes a degree adverb, as when James Justinian Morier's Zorhab the Hostage (1832) arms a spear "tipped with the most perfectly worked steel." The same wrought family also yields the needlework meaning, where the labor goes onto a surface instead of into a shape.

4. 4
   adjective

   Crafted or developed in the way or to the extent indicated by an accompanying word, as in 'finely worked' or 'tightly worked'.

   The architect submitted a meticulously worked blueprint.

   Her thesis was a tightly worked piece of reasoning.

   Similarcrafted, constructed

   Note

   Here the degree lives in the adverb, not in the adjective. Worked rarely stands alone in this sense. It leans on well, tightly, carefully or meticulously, and it does not take more or most itself. William Singers, writing on wheat and barley in 1811, praises "well worked and manured clay soils," a reminder that the phrase began on the farm, of ground thoroughly tilled, before it reached blueprints and arguments.

5. 5
   adjective

   Decorated or embellished, especially with embroidery.

   The bride wore a gown of richly worked silk.

   Antique worked samplers hang in the museum's textile room.

   Similarembroidered, embellished, decorated

   Oppositeplain, unadorned

   Note

   Cloth is where the meaning shifts. Worked metal has been shaped, but worked linen or worked silk has been ornamented, usually with needlework laid over the fabric. William Alexander's The Costume of the Russian Empire (1803) describes women wearing "a worked piece of linen over their head," which means an embroidered cloth, not merely a hemmed one. Let the material decide the reading: with textiles, assume decoration.

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