Swelter

//ˈswɛl.tɚ// noun, verb

noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Intense heat.

    "The summer swelter did not relent until late in September, most years."

Verb
  1. 1
    To suffer terribly from intense heat. intransitive
  2. 2
    suffer from intense heat wordnet
  3. 3
    To perspire greatly from heat. intransitive
  4. 4
    be uncomfortably hot wordnet
  5. 5
    To cause to faint, to overpower, as with heat. transitive

    "It was so rare a piece of fun To see the swelter'd cattle run"

Synonyms

All synonyms
bakebe in heatbeaded browbeads of sweatblazebloom

Example

More examples

"It was so rare a piece of fun To see the swelter'd cattle run"

Etymology

From Middle English swelteren, frequentative form of Middle English swelten (“to die; faint”), from Old English sweltan (“to die”), from Proto-West Germanic *sweltan, from Proto-Germanic *sweltaną (“to die”), from Proto-Indo-European *swel- (“to smolder; burn”), equivalent to swelt + -er (frequentative suffix).

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