esmayar

Spanish

Etymology

Borrowed from Old French esmaier (“to perturb”). Doublet of desmayar. Cognate with Galician esmayar.

desmayar and esmayar used to be interchangeable, but esmayar is now obsolete and only found in its adjective form esmayado or more commonly esmayao (being hungry or famished), in southern Spanish dialects.

No conjugated instances of desmayar or esmayar meaning "being hungry or famished" have been found.

The sense of "being hungry" may have been influenced or derived from Galician-Portuguese esmagar "craving to eat".

It may have also developed by the fact that one faints when they are famished.

Verb

esmayar (first-person singular present esmayo, first-person singular preterite esmayé, past participle esmayado)

1. (obsolete) (takes a reflexive pronoun) to faint (lose consciousness)
   • 1928, Arturo Benavides Santos, Juan y Juanita, novela histórica, page 104:

     […] Espués que se jueron toos del Panteón, la Maire superiora del hospital, onde me habían llevao, me ijo que le rezáramos un paire nuestro, cuando lo acabamos, yo me golví a esmayar. […]

     (please add an English translation of this quotation)

     After everyone left the Pantheon, the Mother Superior of the hospital, where they had taken me, told me that we should pray an Our Father. When we finished, I fainted again.

2. (obsolete, transitive) to cause a person to faint
3. (obsolete, intransitive) to dishearten

Descendants

• esmayado
• esmayao