embower

Definition from Wiktionary, a free dictionary

[edit] English

[edit] Alternative spellings

• imbower

This entry lacks etymological information. If you are familiar with the origin of this word, please add it to the page as described here.

This entry needs pronunciation information. If you are familiar with enPR, IPA, or SAMPA then please add some!

[edit] Verb

to embower (third-person singular simple present embowers, present participle embowering, simple past and past participle embowered)

1. (transitive, poetic) To enclose something or someone as if in a bower; shelter with foliage.
   • 1674, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Second Edition, Book IX

     Her hand he seis’d, and to a shadie bank, / Thick overhead with verdant roof imbowr’d

   • 1809, Washington Irving, A History of New York …, by Dietrich Knickerbocker

     A small Indian village, pleasantly embowered in a grove of spreading elms.

   • 1852, Alfred Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott

     And the silent isle imbowers / The Lady of Shalott

   • 1884, Donald Grant Mitchell, Bound Together

     The embowered lanes, and the primroses and the hawthorn

2. (intransitive) To lodge or rest in or as in a bower.
   • 1591, Edmund Spenser, Virgil’s Gnat, line 225

     But the small birds in their wide boughs embowring / Chaunted their sundrie tunes with sweete consent;

3. (intransitive) To form a bower.
   • (A date for this quote is being sought): John Milton

[edit] Translations

[edit] References

• embower in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913
• The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1914