potted

English

Etymology

From pot +‎ -ed. Adjective meaning "prepared in advance" by analogy with potted meat (canned meat), first used in a published work by L. Susan Stebbing in her Pelican classic Thinking to some purpose (1939), where "potted thinking" is defined as "a compressed statement to save us the trouble of thinking".

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɒtɪd

Verb

potted

1. simple past and past participle of pot

   potted meat

Adjective

potted (not comparable)

1. (of a plant) Grown or planted in a plant pot.

   Granny waters her potted plants on the windowsill every day.

2. (informal) Prepared in advance, as though preserved by potting.

   Synonym: prepared

   The company released a potted statement.

3. (slang) Drunk.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:drunk

4. (of a biographical or historical account) Expressed in a relatively short, brief form.

   a potted history

   • 2023, Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood, page 210:

     what she shared aloud with him after the movie or the episode was over was often just a potted version of a much more probing and speculative conversation that had already happened in her head.

   • 2023 October 7, Jim Pickard, “It's not government that creates jobs”, in FT Weekend, Life & Arts, page 3:

     In it she gives a potted history of leading figures from Beatrice Webb to Christine Lagarde and—her favourite—Janet Yellen, the US Treasury secretary, whom she recently met in Washington.

Derived terms

• potted plant
• potted shrimp

 

Further reading

• “potted”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.