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I have noticed many compound adjectives with an "ed" ending, such as "snowed-under" or "three-legged". It looks a bit weird since I have also saw words like "high-price" and "high-quality" in some essays.
Is there any difference between those with and without an "ed" ending? Is there a principle about it? Or is it just somewhat idiomatic?
The past participle of the verb can be used adjectivally, whether alone, in combination with some agent, or with a preposition, or with an adverb:
The door was newly painted.
The sweater was moth-eaten.
The game was rained-out. Too many rained-out games lately.
They ate some slow-cooked BBQ brisket.
The commodities trading floor is a very fast-paced environment.
The sweater had been eaten by moths. It was raining so heavily the game had to be cancelled. The BBQ brisket had been cooked very slowly.
You will also see compound nouns used as adjectival modifiers:
This new margarine tastes as good as the high-price spread.
Her young son plays slow-pitch baseball.
The difference comes from whether we considering a verb or a noun; the action that resulted in something, or the thing itself. It does get a bit more complicated because we're using these constructs as modifiers
a high-pitched voice
his voice had a surprisingly high pitch
but to focus just on the noun/verb concept:
I can choose the tone of my voice, I can choose a pitch (noun). I can pitch (verb) my voice.
When we are using the word pitch as a verb its past tense is pitched. So describing the sound we can say
Her voice was high pitched
we are hearing the result of a speaker pitching their voice.
Similarly snow can be a noun or a verb. We can say
Snow (noun) has fallen.
It has snowed.
Note that snow in this usage is an impersonal verb, there is no actual subject in the sentence; it is a kind of place holder.
However (as Peter Shor has observed) there is another way in which the -ed may used, as a direct addition to a noun. Examples:
Brown-eyed girl
Broad-leaved plant
These are pseudo-participials, which are derived from nouns. I refer to this question in our sister site at the quotation from Downing and Locke, mentioned there.
Such pseudo-participials are often modified, as the modification represents some non-essential feature. We don’t say *a leaved plant, *a haired girl, because plants normally have leaves and girls have hair. Not all leaves are big and not all girls’ hair is dark, however, allowing the formation of big-leaved and dark-haired: a dark-haired girl. In a camera’ed bystander, by contrast, no modifier is needed because carrying a camera is not an essential feature of a bystander.
(p 436)
