embower

English

Alternative forms

• imbower (archaic)

Etymology

This etymology is incomplete. You can help Wiktionary by elaborating on the origins of this term.
Ultimately from Old English būr, from Proto-Germanic *būraz. Cognate with German Bauer (“birdcage”), Old Norse búr, (whence Danish bur, Swedish bur (“cage”)). Equivalent to en- +‎ bower.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɛmˈbaʊɚ/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

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.
   • 1667, John Milton, “Book IX”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC:

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

   • 1809, Diedrich Knickerbocker [pseudonym; Washington Irving], A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), New York, N.Y.: Inskeep & Bradford, […], →OCLC:

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

   • 1838, [Letitia Elizabeth] Landon (indicated as editor), chapter XIX, in Duty and Inclination: […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 243:

     The house stood in a situation so embowered, solitary, and remote from others, that when evening closed in, Mrs. De Brooke and her daughter, had they not reposed their security on the usual tranquillity of the neighbourhood, might have felt their courage forsake them; […]

   • 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, chapter I, in The House Behind the Cedars:

     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, Ed[mund] Sp[enser], “Virgils Gnat”, in Complaints. Containing Sundrie Small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie. […], London: […] William Ponsonbie, […], →OCLC:
     line 225

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

3. (intransitive) To form a bower.
   • 1667, John Milton, “Book XI”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC, lines 302-305:

     Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
     In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades
     High overarch't imbowr; or scattered sedge
     Afloat

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, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• William Dwight Whitney and Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1914), “embower”, in The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, revised edition, volumes II (D–Hoon), New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.