foeman

English

Etymology

From Middle English foman (“an enemy, devil, demon”), from Old English fāhman (“enemy”), equivalent to foe +‎ man.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈfəʊmən/

Noun

foeman (plural foemen)

1. (archaic) An enemy; a foe in battle; an armed or unarmed adversary; a demon
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto VII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:

     a snaggy Oke, which he had torne / Out of his mothers bowelles, and it made / His mortall mace, wherewith his foemen he dismayde.

   • 2000, George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords, Bantam, published 2011, page 583:

     ‘I count no day as lived unless I have loved a woman, slain a foeman, and eaten a fine meal...and the days that I have lived are as numberless as the stars in the sky.’

   • 2005, Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae‎^[1] (Historical Fiction), Random House, →ISBN:

     Who were these foemen, who had taken with them to the house of the dead ten, or as some reports said, as many as twenty for every one of their own fallen?

   • 2009 August 14, Mark Dery, “Smart Bombs: Mark Dery, Steven Pinker on the Nature-Nurture Wars and the Politics of IQ”, in BoingBoing‎^[2], retrieved 2012-02-10:

     Exhaustively knowledgeable about the science of cognition, and a foeman who gives as good as he gets (if not better) in the nature-versus-nurture culture wars, Pinker seemed the perfect foil for some of my ideas about the IQ test.

Middle English

Noun

foeman

1. Alternative form of foman