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bought

verbadjectivenountop 1 000 in film dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbɔːt//
  • United States//ˈbɔt//
  • //ˈbɑt//
  • //ˈbɒt//

Compromised by money from special interests; corrupt.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of buysimple past and past participle of buy.

    She bought an expensive bag last week.

    People have bought gas masks.

    Our products can be bought at your local store.

    In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%.

Etymology

See buy.

adjective

  1. 1

    informalCompromised by money from special interests; corrupt.

    Any senators who vote for this bill must be bought.

    Don't bother filing a complaint, the regulators are bought.

    If union leadership is bought, why should we even pay dues?

noun

  1. 1

    obsoleteA bend; flexure; curve; a hollow angle.

  2. 2

    obsoleteA bend or hollow in a human or animal body.

  3. 3

    obsoleteA curve or bend in a river, mountain chain, or other geographical feature.

    the river it selfe turneth North east and is stil a navigable streame. On the westerne side of this bought is Tauxenent with 40 men.

  4. 4

    obsoleteThe part of a sling that contains the stone.

  5. 5

    obsoleteA fold, bend, or coil in a tail, snake's body etc.

    Her huge long taile her den all ouerſpred, / Yet was in knots and many boughtes vpwound, / Pointed with mortall ſting.

Etymology

From Middle English bought, bowght, bouȝt, *buȝt, probably an alteration of bight, biȝt, byȝt (“bend, bight”) after bowen, buwen, buȝen (“to bow, bend”). Cognate with Scots boucht, bucht, bout (“bend”). More at bight and bout.

Forms

plural
boughts
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).