handled

Handled is the past tense and past participle of the verb handle. In general use, it expresses that something has been touched, manipulated, or dealt with. This covers both physical handling of objects and more abstract tasks, such as processing a request or managing a situation. For example, “The samples were carefully handled” and “The team has handled the crisis well.”

As a participle, handled forms perfect tenses: has handled, have handled, had handled, and can appear in passive constructions: “The issue was handled by the team.” The verb handle also yields the broader sense of managing or dealing with something, as in “She handled the question deftly.”

Handled can function adjectivally to describe the manner of handling. Common usages include well-handled, poorly handled, or mishandled, often hyphenated in compounds: a well-handled crisis, a poorly-handled procedure. The related noun is handling, and related forms include handler and handleable (the latter is less common; handleable or handleable variants appear in some contexts).

Etymology and history: the word derives from the verb handle, whose roots lie in Germanic languages and Old English. The modern past tense ending -ed is a standard English development, producing the regular form handled.

Other domains: in computing and information technology, a handle is a token or reference used to access a resource. In this sense, events or exceptions may be “handled” by software, meaning they are processed or managed by code; the opposite is “unhandled.”

See also: handle (disambiguation), handling, handler, handleable.