Profiled

Profiled is the past tense and past participle of profile. It has multiple uses across language, data processing, statistics, and design, with meaning determined by context.

As a verb, to profile someone or something means to create or gather a profile—an organized description of characteristics, background, or behavior. The phrase “the suspect was profiled” indicates that investigators attempted to form a profile. In broader usage, the word can describe any action that results in a profile, such as profiling a dataset or a user.

In data management, data profiling is the systematic examination of data sources to determine their structure, content, quality, and relationships. A data set that has been profiled has undergone such analysis; results help inform data cleaning, governance, and integration. In statistics, the term profile appears in “profile likelihood,” and a profiled likelihood refers to maximizing the likelihood over nuisance parameters.

In computing, program profiling is a technique for measuring where a program spends time or resources. A profiled program is instrumented or sampled to produce performance data. In design and manufacturing, to profile a component means to shape or define its cross-sectional profile, such as profiled edges.

The term can also intersect with ethics and law, especially in discussions of profiling by investigators or automated systems, where use and impact depend on context, intent, and safeguards. Overall, profiled indicates that profiling has been performed in a given domain.