ppl. a. [f. CHISEL v.1 (or sb.1) + -ED.]
1. Cut, shaped or wrought with a chisel.
1873. Symonds, Grk. Poets, x. 336. An exquisitely chiselled gem.
1885. Athenæum, 9 May, 606/3. To lay the bones in a chiselled space in the centre.
2. fig. Having clear and sharp outlines, as if cut with a chisel.
1821. Byron, Mar. Fal., II. i. 389. An incarnation of the poet’s god In all his marble-chisell’d beauty.
1825. Lytton, Falkland, 30. The broad and noble brow, and … the chiselled lip.
1830. Tennyson, Character, v. With chisell’d features clear and sleek.
1860. Tyndall, Glac., I. § 5. 39. Its towers and minarets sprang from the general mass with clean chiselled outlines.
b. fig. of thought or its expression.
a. 1862. Buckle, Civiliz. (1869), III. v. 331. That beautiful and chiselled style in which he habitually wrote.
1862. Goulburn, Pers. Relig., ii. (1873), 11. A more distinct and more highly chiselled notion.
1872. Geo. Eliot, Middlem., II. xiii. 222. A chiselled emphasis.
3. Shaped or edged like a chisel.
a. 1737. M. Green, Sparrow & Diam., iii. in Dodsley, I. 147. With chizzled bill a spark ill set He loosen’d from the rest.
1853. Kane, Grinnell Exp., xxx. (1854), 259. A crowbar with chiseled edge extracted the laminæ badly.
