English

Verb

footed

1. simple past tense and past participle of foot

Adjective

footed ‎(comparative more footed, superlative most footed)

1. (in combination) Having a specified form or type of foot or number of feet.
   • 1596, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Canto XII, stanza 2,

     Scarsely had Phœbus in the glooming East / Yet harnessed his firie-footed teeme, / Ne reard above the earth his flaming creast;

   • c. 1607, William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Act III, Scene 1,

     This tiger-footed rage, when it shall find / The harm of unscann'd swiftness, will too late / Tie leaden pounds to's heels.

   • 1609, Thomas Dekker, The Guls Hornbook, in The Guls Hornbook and The Belman of London, London: J.M. Dent, 1936, p. 27,

     To maintaine therefore that sconce of thine, strongly guarded, and in good reparation, never suffer combe to fasten his teeth there: let thy haire grow thick and bushy like a forest, or some wildernesse; lest those sixe-footed creatures that breed in it, and are Tenants to that crowneland of thine, bee hunted to death by every base barbarous Barber; and so that delicate, and tickling pleasure of scratching, be utterly taken from thee:

   • 1674, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II, lines 596-8,

     Thither, by harpy-footed Furies haled, / At certain revolutions all the damned / Are brought;

   • 1892, Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber, translated by H. Bencraft Joly, Book II, Chapter LIII,

     On the east was only laid a single table. But there as well were placed carved screens, covered with dragons, and a short low-footed couch, with a full assortment of back-cushions, reclining-cushions and skin-rugs.

   • 1948, Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country, New York: Scribner, 1987, Chapter 31,

     […] the leaves fell from the trees till they stood as though it were winter, and the small tough-footed boys ran from shade to shade because of the heat of the ground.

   • 2005, Helen Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl, New York: Anchor, 2006, Chapter 17,

     Jess […] moved aside so that her father, sock-footed and carrying a plate with a sandwich on it, could reenter the sitting room.

2. (poetry, usually in combination) Consisting of, or having been put into, metrical feet (of a specified character or number).
   • 2003, Tony K. Stewart, Introduction to Rabindranath Tagore, The Lover of God, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, p. 12,

     As for the strict forms in which the original poems were written, it seemed an empty exercise to force English into those particular strictures, which in Bengali literary tradition are richly associative but which in English are not. The familiar fourteen-syllable payār couplet with its aa bb cc rhymes and the more intricate three-footed tripadi of variable length and rhyme were the first casualties of the process.

   each six-footed line of the verse

Derived terms