enisle

English

Alternative forms

• inisle

Etymology

en- +‎ isle

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -aɪl

Verb

1. (transitive) To make into an island.
   • 1930, Walter De la Mare, Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, p. 118, [1]

     […] long before England itself was enisled by the sea.

   • 1966, David Keir, The City of Edinburgh, Collins, p. 28, [2]

     […] park-like belts of villas enisled by lawns […]

2. (transitive, figurative, by extension) To isolate.
   • 1876, Edmond Holmes, "After Death" in Poems, London: Henry S. King & Co., p. 82, [3]

     […] no reply / Comes from the vast, enisling sphere / Of spirit, limitless, divine, / So far from me, so strangely mine.

   • 1925, Robinson Jeffers, "For Una" in The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. [4]

     To-night, dear, / Let's forget all that, that and the war, / And enisle ourselves a little beyond time, / You with this Irish whiskey, I with red wine / While the stars go over the sleepless ocean,

   • 2005, Jed Horne, Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, p. 25, [5]

     […] one in ten New Orleansians lived in the projects—some 50,000 souls more or less, almost all of them women with too many children, a gulag of women and children enisled by poverty.

Anagrams

• ensile, lienes, senile, silene