Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Owning or mastering something. Used with of: one who is possessed of great wealth.
- adj. Controlled by or as if by a spirit or other force; obsessed: a teenager by love possessed.
- adj. Calm; collected: one who remained possessed in times of great trial.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Controlled by some evil spirit or influence; demented; mad.
Wiktionary
- v. Simple past tense and past participle of possess.
- adj. controlled by evil spirits.
- adj. Seized by powerful emotions.
- adj. not comparable Having; owning.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. influenced or controlled by a powerful force such as a strong emotion
- adj. frenzied as if possessed by a demon
Examples
“We don't like to use the word possessed because that means they don't have any power of their own.”
“One of the requisite job skills for a head waiter in a high class Austrian restaurant is being intimately familiar with the title possessed by every regular customer, and most occasional customers, of said restaurant.”
“Parents have used the word 'possessed,' " says Susan Swedo , chief of pediatrics and developmental neuroscience at the National Institute of Mental Health who first made the connection to strep in the mid-1990s.”
The Wall Street Journal: Does Strep Throat Trigger Serious Ills?
“The former work of the same title possessed the same kind of merit.”
Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 3
“Sat 10/31/09 11: 42 AM theatre version - katie disappears downstairs, screams for micah, who runs down … there is an obvious struggle .. then silence .. then sounds of heavy footsteps coming back upstairs. micah is thrown into the room very suddenly, then katie walks in possessed, all jerky walking, and then lunges at the camera – goes black.”
'Paranormal Activity': Three super-scary alternate endings (SPOILER ALERT!) | EW.com
“A young Winston Churchill wrote his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, about his experiences fighting those tribes, whom he described as possessed of a “wild and merciless fanaticism.””
“Clearly, both the Spanish and Mesoamerican populations of New Spain possessed cultures that encouraged them to fear the consequences of their personal (and collective) behavior.”
Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico
“To say that all those people who didn't choose you but voted for Obama are naive and demon possessed is arrogant and prideful.”
“How I understand by osmosis that particular obsession and how possessed is Father Declan by it all.”
“Active" farm machinery, while possessed, is still a distant second in horror, mayhem, and finality to the Lucifer Incarnate of farm machinery, which would be "abandoned farm machinery.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘possessed’.
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®emovies
Movies or TV shows where the titles are also common words, generally one-word titles.
lost, alien, bug, elephant, siege, gladiator, flock, captivity, piano, roots, freaks, moonstruck and 269 more...
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Words that are also movies
Unabashedly stolen from a comment made by courier12.
vertigo, serendipity, casablanca, psycho, jaws, fantasia, stagecoach, network, rocky, giant, platoon, unforgiven and 285 more...
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Words of the Day
glabella, chirotony, nook-shotten, crapehanger, filemot, swirlie, egosurf, lexiphanicism, Ruritanian, stichometry, chrononaut, faldstool and 1991 more...
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a case of cases
evoking a kind of heavy chest of drawers, for me. Latin (and German) at 11; now Finnish, and a fascination for what else is out there.
Entering all these, I did have to struggle not t...nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, vocative, locative, partitive, inessive, elative, illative, adessive and 62 more...
Tweets
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