polished

comparative more polished · superlative most polished

1. Made smooth or shiny by polishing.

   polished shoes

   2 more examples

   But despite its plague of tunnels, the run-in on this route is of unusual interest to the locomotive enthusiast: besides the hordes of self-important saddle-tanks shunting in the extensive yards, there was at one time the chance of seeing those slender little North London engines, with their large outside cylinders and no visible storage place for coal, and also an occasional South Eastern locomotive sporting a lot of polished brass.

   1951 October, R. S. McNaught, “Lines of Approach”, in Railway Magazine, page 704

   A very neat old woman, still in her good outdoor coat and best beehive hat, was sitting at a polished mahogany table on whose surface there were several scored scratches so deep that a triangular piece of the veneer had come cleanly away,[…].

   1963, Margery Allingham, “Foreword”, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC

2. Refined, elegant.

   a polished performance

   4 more examples

   We may be well assured, that a writer, conversant with the world, would never have ventured to expose the gods of his country to public ridicule, had they not already been the objects of secret contempt among the polished and enlightened orders of society.

   1776, Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol I, ch 2-pt i

   "What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy! There is nothing like dancing after all. I consider it as one of the first refinements of polished society."

   1813, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

   She was frankly disappointed. For some reason she had expected to discover a burglar of one or another accepted type—either a dashing cracksman in full-blown evening dress, lithe, polished, pantherish, or a common yegg, a red-eyed, unshaven, burly brute in the rags and tatters of a tramp.

   1914 November, Louis Joseph Vance, “An Outsider […]”, in Munsey’s Magazine, volume LIII, number II, New York, N.Y.: The Frank A[ndrew] Munsey Company, […], published 1915, →OCLC, chapter III (Accessory After the Fact), page 382, column 2

   At 62, the world’s eighth richest man [Jensen Huang] is compact, polished, and known among colleagues for his quick temper as well as his visionary leadership.

   2025 December 11, Charlie Campbell, Andrew R. Chow and Billy Perrigo, “The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year”, in Time, archived from the original on 11 Dec 2025

1. participlepastsimple past and past participle of polish