v.
A past participle of buy.
adj.
- Commercially made; purchased, as opposed to homemade: boughten bread.
- 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.
