embower

English

Alternative forms

• imbower

Etymology

This definition is lacking an etymology or has an incomplete etymology. You can help Wiktionary by giving it a proper etymology.
Ultimately from Old English būr, from Proto-Germanic *būraz. Cognate with German Bauer (“birdcage”), Old Norse búr (Danish bur, Swedish bur (“cage”)).

Pronunciation

• IPA: /ɛmˈbaʊɚ/

Verb

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

   • 1900, Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars, Chapter I,

     A few rods farther led him past the old black Presbyterian church, with its square tower, embowered in a stately grove; past the Catholic church, with its many crosses, and a painted wooden figure of St. James in a recess beneath the gable; and past the old Jefferson House, once the leading hotel of the town, in front of which political meetings had been held, and political speeches made, and political hard cider drunk, in the days of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too."

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.
   • (Can we date this quote?) John Milton

Translations

enclose something or someone as if in a bower; shelter with foliage

Dutch: omhullen (nl)

lodge or rest in or as in a bower

form a bower

References

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