empowered

English

Etymology

From empower +‎ -ed.

Adjective

empowered (comparative more empowered, superlative most empowered)

1. Having been given powers.
   • 2024 January 10, Chris Green, “Empowered...energised... and managing for success”, in RAIL, number 1000, page 22:

     Empowered staff deliver the goods and exceed your expectations. Disempowered staff develop a 'sullen obedience' where they stop driving new initiatives and just await orders.

2. (US) Having been given the power to make choices relevant to one's situation.
   • 1995, Chicago Assembly, Lawrence B. Joseph, Crime, Communities, and Public Policy, page 288:

     Policy moderation in the past, I argued above, has depended on a coalition between civic elites and newly empowered minorities—or at least a resolve by civic elites to discourage a racially polarizing politics of law and order.

3. (US) Acting with confidence.

Verb

empowered

1. simple past and past participle of empower

Noun

empowered (plural empowereds)

1. One who is empowered.
   • 1996, Tom Selwyn, The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth Making in Tourism, →ISBN, page 83:

     The category of sex tourism, which assimilates phenomena ranging from southeast Asian brothels run for foreign men by international crime cartels with the covert support of national governments (see Hall, 1992 and Truong, 1990) to the 'sugar mummie' phenomenon wherein older women tourists travel to tourist centres in order to enjoy sexual encounters with local youths, is well suited to represent the expolitative character of much of the tourism trade between the developed and less-developed countries in so far as it foregrounds the destructive playing out of empowereds' irresponsible desires on the bodies of those immobilized by poverty and lack of alternative opportunities.

   • 2003, Elle - Issue 220, page 188:

     The coolest of these "empowereds" laugh with the shock jocks ogling the hotties and ragging on the fatties and the prudes.

   • 2016, Alex Kost, Vigilance: A Heroics Novel, →ISBN:

     And if he had gotten his hands on Casey while the Heroics kids were fighting those controlled empowereds, he would've made sure that she felt every single bit of agony that he hadn't been able to inflict on her when she was.