Abash

//əˈbæʃ// verb

verb ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To make ashamed; to embarrass; to destroy the self-possession of, as by exciting suddenly a consciousness of guilt, mistake, or inferiority; to disconcert; to discomfit. transitive

    "He was a man whom no check could abash"

  2. 2
    cause to be embarrassed; cause to feel self-conscious wordnet
  3. 3
    To lose self-possession; to become ashamed. intransitive, obsolete

    "[...] as King Uther lay by his queen, he asked her, by the faith she owed to him, whose was the body; then she sore abashed to give answer."

Synonyms

All synonyms
embarrassconfoundconfusedisconcertembarrasshumiliate

Example

More examples

"The titter that rippled around the room appeared to abash the boy."

Etymology

Attested from 1303, as Middle English abaisen, abaishen, abashen (“lose one's composure, be upset”), from the later 14th-century also transitive "to make ashamed, to perplex or embarrass"; from Anglo-Norman abaïss, from Middle French abair, abaisser (“lose one's composure, be startled, be stunned”), from Old French esbaïr, (French ébahir), from es- (“utterly”) + baïr (“to astonish”), from Medieval Latin *exbadō, from ex- (“out of”) + bado (“I gape, yawn”), an onomatopoeic word imitating a yawn, see also French badaud (“rubbernecker”).

Related phrases

self possession

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.