Meanings
- not comparableGrown or planted in a plant pot.
Granny waters her potted plants on the windowsill every day.
- informalnot comparablePrepared in advance, as though preserved by potting.
The company released a potted statement.
Synonyms: prepared
- not comparableslangDrunk.
Synonyms: Adrian Quist, adrip, aled up, all mops and brooms, arseholed, a sheet in the wind, a sheet in the wind's eye, bedrunken
- not comparableExpressed in a relatively short, brief form.
a potted history
2 more examples
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, Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood, page 210In 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.
2023 October 7, Jim Pickard, “It’s not government that creates jobs”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 3
Synonyms & antonyms
adjectivePrepared in advance, as though preserved by potting.
adjectiveDrunk.
More synonyms by meaning
adjectiveof plants; planted or grown in a pot
adjectivepreserved in a pot or can or jar
adjective(British informal) summarized or abridged
Synonym sets from Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0.
Origin
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".
Full word history & related roots →Rhymes & wordplay
Rhymes with potted
Cite this entry
potted. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/potted
“potted.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/potted. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “potted,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/potted.
Source: potted on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.