wreathe

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Pronunciation

• (British, America) IPA: /ɹiːð/

Verb

wreathe (wreathes, present participle wreathing; past and past participle wreathed)

1. (transitive) To twist, curl or entwine something into a shape similar to a wreath.
   • c. 1594, William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act IV, Scene 3,

     You do not love Maria; Longaville

     Did never sonnet for her sake compile,

     Nor never lay his wreathed arms athwart

     His loving bosom to keep down his heart.

   • 1681, Andrew Marvell, “The Fair Singer,” lines 10-12,

     But how should I avoid to be her slave,

     Whose subtle art invisibly can wreathe

     My fetters of the very air I breathe?

   • 1818, John Keats, Endymion, Book I, lines 6-11

     Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

     A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

     Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

     Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

     Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways

     Made for our searching: […]

2. (transitive) To form a wreathlike shape around something.
   • 1915, T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”

     We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

     By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

     Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

   • 1942, Emily Carr, The Book of Small, “The Orange Lily,”

     The flowers crackled at Anne’s touch. “Enough to wreathe the winter’s dead,” she said with a happy little sigh and, taking a pink bud from the pile, twined it in the lace of her black cap.

3. (intransitive) To curl, writhe or spiral in the form of a wreath.
   • 1833, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “A True Dream,” New York: Macmillan, 1914,

     I unsealed the vial mystical,

     I outpoured the liquid thing,

     And while the smoke came wreathing out,

     I stood unshuddering.

4. (obsolete) To turn violently aside or around; to wrench.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II.i:

     from so heauie sight his head did wreath, / Accusing fortune, and too cruell fate [...].

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