manswear
English
Alternative forms
Etymology
From (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Middle English mansweren, from (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Old English mānswerian (“to forswear, perjure oneself”), from mān (“bad, criminal, false”) + swerian (“to swear”).
Verb
manswear (third-person singular simple present manswears, present participle manswearing, simple past manswore, past participle mansworn)
- (transitive, British, dialectal) To swear falsely; perjure oneself.
- 1819 December 20 (indicated as 1820), Walter Scott, chapter XII, in Ivanhoe; a Romance. […], volume III, Edinburgh: […] Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co. […], →OCLC, page 302:
- I require of thee, as a man of thy word, on pain of being held faithless, man-sworn, and nidering [footnote: Infamous], to forgive and to receive to thy paternal affection the good knight, Wilfrid of Ivanhoe.
Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “manswear”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)