well-covered

See also: well covered

English

Alternative forms

• well covered

Adjective

well-covered (comparative more well-covered, superlative most well-covered)

1. Amply equipped or provisioned, especially with respect to a place where food is served.
   • 1864 August – 1866 January, [Elizabeth] Gaskell, chapter 33, in Wives and Daughters. An Every-day Story. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Smith, Elder and Co., […], published 1866, →OCLC:

     He kept shaking Mr Gibson's hand all the time till he had placed him, nothing loth, at the well-covered dining-table.

   • 1865 May 15 – 1866 January 1, Anthony Trollope, “Taking Possession”, in The Belton Estate. […], volume III, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published December 1865 (indicated as 1866), →OCLC, page 239:

     How are you to bid a starving man to wait when you put him down at a well-covered board?

2. (chiefly British, of a person, euphemistic) Fat, corpulent, full-figured.
   • 1859, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter 26, in Adam Bede […], volumes (please specify |volume=I, II, or III), Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC:

     That simple dancing of well-covered matrons, laying aside for an hour the cares of house and dairy, remembering but not affecting youth, not jealous but proud of the young maidens by their side […] it would be a pleasant variety to see all that sometimes.

   • 1921, John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga, part 2, ch. 11:

     "She wasn't much of a skeleton as I remember her," murmured Euphemia, "extremely well-covered."

   • 2003 March 20, Thomas Stuttaford, “Eat less and walk more to keep diabetes at bay”, in Times Online, UK, retrieved 24 June 2008:

     The sculptor Botero—influenced perhaps by Maillol’s love of well covered women—created in 1981 an overweight, stumpy couple.

Derived terms

• well-coveredness