• Bedwell

    Origin

    From -("around, about") + dwell. Compare Middle Dutch bedwellen.

    Full definition of bedwell

    Verb

    1. (ambitransitive) To dwell around or about (a place); inhabit.
      • 1841, Alexander Crawford Lindsay Crawford (Earl of), Ballads, songs and poems:... At first like a twilight cloud, Yet momently clearer in colour, I saw church-domes and steeples, And lastly a whole city, Ancient-looking, Netherlandish, Man-bedwelt in.
      • 1843, Robert Southey, Sir Walter Scott, A memoir of the life and writings of the late William Taylor:Gentry of narrow income used to bedwell Montreuil; they are gone, war, want or death knows where.
      • 1995, William Lovitt, Harriet Brundage Lovitt, Modern technology in the Heideggerian perspective:Even as he looks squarely at calculable nature, he "retrieves readily be seen to be involved in the reference to "that which announces itself in the processes and conditions of nature that pervasively rule the world we bedwell."
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