abash

verb
/əˈbæʃ/UK/əˈbæʃ/US

Etymology

Attested from 1303, as Middle English abaisen, abaishen, abashen (“lose one's composure, be upset”), from the later 14th-century also transitive "to make ashamed, to perplex or embarrass"; from Anglo-Norman abaïss, from Middle French abair, abaisser (“lose one's composure, be startled, be stunned”), from Old French esbaïr, (French ébahir), from es- (“utterly”) + baïr (“to astonish”), from Medieval Latin *exbadō, from ex- (“out of”) + bado (“to gape, yawn”), an onomatopoeic word imitating a yawn, see also French badaud (“rubbernecker”).

  1. derived from *exbadō
  2. derived from esbair
  3. derived from abair
  4. derived from abaiss
  5. inherited from abaisen

Definitions

  1. To make ashamed

    To make ashamed; to embarrass; to destroy the self-possession of, as by exciting suddenly a consciousness of guilt, mistake, or inferiority; to disconcert; to discomfit.

    • He was a man whom no check could abash
    • The stare seemed to abash Poirot.
  2. To lose self-possession

    To lose self-possession; to become ashamed.

    • [...] as King Uther lay by his queen, he asked her, by the faith she owed to him, whose was the body; then she sore abashed to give answer.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for abash. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA