| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| boughten |
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| SYLLABICATION: | bought·en |
| PRONUNCIATION: |  bôt n |
| VERB: | Chiefly Northern U.S. A past participle of buy. | | ADJECTIVE: | 1. Commercially made; purchased, as opposed to homemade: boughten bread. 2. Artificial; false. Used of teeth. | | REGIONAL NOTE: | American regional dialects allow freer adjectival use of certain past participles of verbs than does Standard English. Time-honored examples are boughten (chiefly Northern U.S.) and bought (chiefly Southern U.S.) to mean “purchased rather than homemade”: a boughten dress, bought bread. The Northern form boughten (as in store boughten) features the participial ending –en, added to bought, the participial form, probably by analogy with more common participial adjectives such as frozen. Another development, analogous to homemade, is evident in bought-made, cited in DARE from a Texas informant.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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