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accused

verbnounadjectivecommon in dialogue

  • United States//əˈkjuzd//
  • //əˈkjuzəd//

The person charged with an offense; the defendant in a criminal case.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of accusesimple past and past participle of accuse

    For quotations using this term, see Citations:accused.

Etymology

* (noun): First attested in the 1590's. * From accuse (“blame”) + -ed

noun

  1. 1

    The person charged with an offense; the defendant in a criminal case.

    The accused arrived at the Baoshan District Court in Shanghai in the morning and a tribunal officer told AFP that a verdict may be issued later on Monday, but it was up to the judge.

adjective

  1. 1

    Having been accused; being the target of accusations.

    This power chiefly fell to the queen, and she was more accused than ever of too much leaning towards her own country; […]

    Naples had an almost stronger preference for the interposition of Spain, while the great republic of Venice in the eyes of Italy stood accused of aspiring to bring the whole peninsula under its sway, […]

    If she felt unimportant, you showed her that she was important to you. If she felt accused, you reassured her. If she felt guilty, you helped her feel better.

Forms

plural
accuseds
comparative
more accused
superlative
most accused
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).