manswear
English edit
Alternative forms edit
Etymology edit
From Middle English mansweren, from Old English mānswerian (“to forswear, perjure oneself”), from mān (“bad, criminal, false”) + swerian (“to swear”).
Verb edit
manswear (third-person singular simple present manswears, present participle manswearing, simple past manswore, past participle mansworn)
- (transitive, chiefly British, dialectal) To swear falsely; perjure oneself.
- 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 edit
- “manswear”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.