befeathered

befeathered

English

Verb

befeathered

1. simple past tense and past participle of befeather

Adjective

befeathered (not comparable)

1. Feathered; covered or augmented with feathers.
   • 1860, George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Book I, Chapter 7,

     He bore about the same relation to his tall, good-looking wife, with her balloon sleeves, abundant mantle, and a large befeathered and beribboned bonnet, as a small fishing-smack bears to a brig with all its sails spread.

   • 1920, Gilbert Frankau, Peter Jameson: A Modern Romance, New York: Knopf, Part Three, § 1,

     It was the zenith of London’s last, maddest “season”; but her pleasure crowd—the dancers in her night-clubs; the befeathered scantily-draped women of her Opera House; the placemen, the panderers and the nincompoops who made pretence of governing her—had departed; were “week-ending” in pseudo-rusticity, twenty, thirty, a hundred miles away.

   • 1973, Jan Morris, Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, Part Two, Chapter 16, p. 321,

     […] here is a conversation between this towering Christian and his absolute antithesis in the imperial hierarchy, a befeathered pagan rain-doctor of the Bakwain tribe in central Africa—the very class of man, one might suppose, for whose enlightenment Victoria’s Empire existed.

   • 2016, Justin O. Schmidt, The Sting of the Wild, Johns Hopkins University Press, →ISBN, page 116:

     Biting works well against other attacking ants but not against befeathered birds.