manswear

English

Alternative forms

• mainswear (Northern England)
• manswere, maneswere, maneswere, mansweir (Scotland)

Etymology

From Middle English mansweren, from 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)

1. (transitive, chiefly British, dialectal) To swear falsely; perjure oneself.

   Synonym: misswear

   • 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.

   • 1916, The Prose Edda (translation), page 82:

     There are doomed to wade the weltering streams / Men that are mansworn, and they that murderers are.

References

• “manswear”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.