well-formed, ppl. a.
a. of persons and material things.
| c 1520 W. Walter Guystarde & Syg. (Roxb.) A iij, Of shape and persone she was well fourmed. a 1586 Sidney Arcadia iii. (1922) 58 The kissing of her welformed mouth. 1645 Waller Poems, Palamede to Zelinde 1 Fairest piece of well form'd earth, Vrge not thus your haughty Birth. 1653 R. Sanders Physiogn. 159 The well formed head is like a Mallet or a Sphear. 1788 A. Hughes Henry & Isab. xviii. II. 88 Not a pleasing view,..or a well-formed tree, was passed without furnishing matter for her observation. 1805 Wordsw. Prelude vii. 206 A range Of well-formed characters, with chalk inscribed Upon the smooth flat stones. 1831 James Phil. Augustus iv, A man of thirty-two or thirty-three years of age, tall, well-formed, handsome. 1863 A. C. Ramsay Phys. Geog. 160 Well-formed flint hatchets. 1883 D. C. Murray Hearts xi, He had a large and well-formed body, plump but not corpulent. |
b. of immaterial things.
| 1643 Dorney (title), A briefe and exact Relation of..Passages that hapned in the late well-formed (and as valiently defended) Seige laid before the City of Glocester. 1725 Watts Logic iv. Introd., A well-formed Proposition, or a just Argument. 1746 Francis Horace, A. P. 230 The Child, who now with firmer Footing walks, And with unfaultering, well-form'd Accents talks. 1759 Goldsm. Pres. State Pol. Learn. xi. (Globe) 444/2 In a well-formed education a course of history should ever precede a course of ethics. 1787 Burns Prol. spoken by Woods 23 Well-form'd taste and sparkling wit. |
(b) spec., formed according to stated grammatical rules.
| 1961 A. G. Oettinger in Proc. Symposia Appl. Math. XII. 104 One important common problem is that of obtaining an algorithm for distinguishing sentences from nonsentences or..well-formed strings from not well-formed strings. 1969 R. A. Hall in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen LXX. 204 The oft-repeated claim that all ‘well-formed’ sentences of a language are derivable from a single syntactic kernel is clearly unfounded. 1980 Amer. Speech LV. 90 ‘Le crabmeat cocktail’ is well-formed in that cocktail has been borrowed into French as a masculine noun. |
c. Logic. Applied to any sequence of symbols conforming to the formation rules of a logical system. Esp. as well-formed formula.
| 1936 A. Church in Amer. Jrnl. Math. LVIII. 346 We select a particular list of symbols... And we define the word formula to mean any finite sequence of symbols out of this list. The terms well-formed formula, [etc.],..are then defined by induction. 1954 I. M. Copi Symbolic Logic vi. 184 In a logistic system..any formulas which on the intended interpretation do not become significant statements are not well formed formulas. 1967 Encycl. Philos. V. 22/2 A formal language L is given by specifying (a) a list of symbols of L and (b) a set of formation rules for combining these symbols into acceptable, or well-formed, expressions (terms, formulas, sentences) of L. 1978 A. G. Hamilton Logic for Mathematicians iii. 53 The use of parentheses in well-formed formulas is precisely given in the definition. |
Hence well-ˈformedness (chiefly in Linguistics).
| 1957 Encycl. Brit. XIV. 306/1 The condition of well-formedness [in logical formulas]. 1961 N. Chomsky in Word XVII. 221 Information as to whether the sequence of phones is a properly formed or grammatical sentence and if not, in what respect it deviates from well-formedness. 1970 J. P. Thorne in J. Lyons New Horizons in Linguistics ix. 186 Between..extremes of well-formedness occur sentences of varying degrees of grammaticalness. 1979 F. Kermode Genesis of Secrecy iii. 64 We depend upon well-formedness..in written language. |