picked

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /pʰɪkt/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪkt

Verb

picked

1. simple past tense and past participle of pick

Adjective

picked (comparative more picked, superlative most picked)

1. Chosen; selected.
2. (zoology, of fishes) Having a pike or spine on the back.

   the picked dogfish

3. (obsolete) fine; spruce; smart; precise; dainty
   • 1590, William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost, V. i. 13:

     He is too / picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, / too peregrinate, as I may call it.

   • 1596, William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, I. i. 193:

     Why then I suck my teeth and catechize / My picked man of countries:

4. (obsolete) pointed; sharp
   • [1611?], Homer, “(please specify |book=I to XXIV)”, in Geo[rge] Chapman, transl., The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets. […], London: […] Nathaniell Butter, OCLC 614803194; The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets, […], volume (please specify the book number), new edition, London: Charles Knight and Co., […], 1843, OCLC 987451361:

     […] an useful bow a skilful bowyer wrought, / Which picked and polished both the ends he hid with horns of gold.

   • 1707, John Mortimer, The whole Art of Husbandry

     A very good way to take them, is to drive a stake into the ground about four foot high above the surface of the earth: Let the stake be made picked at the top, that the jay may not settle on it.

Derived terms

• hand-picked

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for picked in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.)