(imp. & p. p.) Could; was able; knew or known; understood.
Example Sentences:
(1) Thereafter she took what she could get on screen, a reliable member of the Dickens-and-other-period-pieces squad in The Old Curiosity Shop (1979), David Copperfield (1999); Les Misérables (1998); and – a fine creation – the 19th-century traveller Fanny Trollope, complaining about a squalid lack of couth in America, in a 1992 TV series.