verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb

1. 1
   To exhaust by labour; overwork. archaic, obsolete, poetic, transitive

   "She is my goddess plain, And I her shepherd's swain, Albe[it] forswonk and forswat I am."

Example

More examples

"She is my goddess plain, And I her shepherd's swain, Albe[it] forswonk and forswat I am."

Etymology

From Middle English forswinken, equivalent to for- + swink.

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