ebbed

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɛbd/

• Audio (US):

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• Rhymes: -ɛbd

Adjective

ebbed

1. Having receded, or reduced in amount, intensity, or importance; diminished.
   • 1607, William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra:

     And the ebbed man, ne'er loved till ne'er worth love, Comes deared, by being lacked.

   • 1795, Charles Este, A Journey in the Year 1793, page 109:

     But now, like the ebbed finances of one out of place, every thing seems to hang about it lose and empty.

   • 1917 January, Leonora Orem Rocheleau, “The Great Equation”, in The Mother's Magazine, volume 12, number 1, page 41:

     They flushed hotly as they met by chance and their hands touched in the slack clasp of an ebbed friendship.

   • 2005, Thomas Cushman, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, page 205:

     Presided over by a political monster, with two sons waiting in the possible succession who had more than shown their own aptitude for cruelties that most of the good peace marchers will find nearly unthinkable without their being overcome by existential revulsion and fear, a regime that was certainly a continuing threat to those living under it and perceived, quite reasonable, as a potential if not immediate threat beyond its borders, Saddam's regime gave no grounds at all for confidence in the hypotesis of an “ebbed” future level of killing.

   • 2016, Sylvia Kelso, Source, page 502:

     My first clear—my first new memory is of waking, slowly, so slowly, with the languor of a fever patient whose crisis is past, in an ebbed, remote lucidity as unfamiliar as the feel of sheets.

   • 2018, William Atkins, The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places:

     There were those still living, said Serik when I got back to the car, who had visited the graves since childhood and had watched as, decade by decade, the water below first withdrew, then further withdrew, until the vessels in their obsolescence were abandoned, circumscribed by a shrinking pond and then, as the water vanished, set down in the dry sediment, canted there as if by an ebbed tide that had failed to come back.

Derived terms

• unebbed

 

Verb

ebbed

1. simple past and past participle of ebb