Embower

Pronunciation

• IPA: /É›mˈbaÊŠÉš/

Alternative forms

• imbower

Origin

Ultimately from Old English būr, from Proto-Germanic *būraz. Cognate with German Bauer (“birdcage”), Old Norse búr (Danish bur, Swedish bur (“cage”)).

Full definition of embower

Verb

1. (transitive, poetic) To enclose something or someone as if in a bower; shelter with foliage.
• Milton Lost|IXHer hand he seis’d, and to a shadie bank,
  Thick overhead with verdant roof imbowr’d
• 1809, Washington Irving, A History of New York …, by Dietrich KnickerbockerA small Indian village, pleasantly embowered in a grove of spreading elms.
• 1852, Alfred Tennyson,And the silent isle imbowers
  The Lady of Shalott
• 1884, Donald Grant Mitchell, Bound TogetherThe embowered lanes, and the primroses and the hawthorn
• 1900, Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars, Chapter I,A few rods farther led him past the old black Presbyterian church, with its square tower, embowered in a stately grove; past the Catholic church, with its many crosses, and a painted wooden figure of St. James in a recess beneath the gable; and past the old Jefferson House, once the leading hotel of the town, in front of which political meetings had been held, and political speeches made, and political hard cider drunk, in the days of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too."
2. (intransitive) To lodge or rest in or as in a bower.
• 1591, Edmund Spenser, Virgil’s Gnat, line 225But the small birds in their wide boughs embowring
  Chaunted their sundrie tunes with sweete consent;
3. (intransitive) To form a bower.
• unknown date John Milton