Beath

//biːð// verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To bathe (with warm liquid); foment. dialectal, transitive

    "And in his hand a tall young oake he bore, Whose knottie snags were sharpned all afore, And beath'd in fire for steel to be in sted"

  2. 2
    To dry or heat (unseasoned) wood for the purpose of straightening it. transitive

Synonyms

All synonyms
foment

Example

More examples

"And in his hand a tall young oake he bore, Whose knottie snags were sharpned all afore, And beath'd in fire for steel to be in sted"

Etymology

From Middle English bethen, from Old English beþian, beþigean, beþþan, bæþþan (“to heat, warm, foment, wash, cherish; bathe”), from Proto-West Germanic *baþþjan, *baþigōn, from Proto-Indo-European *bʰeh₁- (“to warm”). Cognate with Middle Dutch betten, bessen (“to moisten with hot water, humidify”).

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