Perfected

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Made completely free from faults or mistakes through improvement or correction ; brought to the highest degree of skill, quality, or excellence by development or practice
2. Refined until no flaws remain, achieving full completeness or accuracy ; advanced to a superior level of ability or quality through continuous effort
3. Completed to a state of flawlessness or precision ; elevated to peak performance or quality by thorough refinement

Etymology: "Perfected" is the past tense and past participle of "perfect," so its story is really the story of the verb's root. That root comes from Latin "perfectus," the past participle of "perficere," meaning "to finish," built from "per-" ("through, thoroughly") and "facere" ("to do, to make"). The sense of finishing something thoroughly is still there at the core: to perfect something is to carry it all the way through to its end. English got the word through Old French "parfit," which is now "parfait." Middle English first borrowed the form "perfit," and in the 15th century writers reshaped the spelling to match the Latin original. So "parfait" and "perfect" are doublets: two English-related words from the same source, one arriving through French and one taken more directly from Latin. Before this borrowing, English already had its own way of saying the idea, "fulfremed," which the Latin-derived word eventually displaced.

Synonyms: refined, enhanced

Antonyms: imperfected