rockabye
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Forms: form: rockabyes
form: rockabyeing
form: rockabying
form: rockabyed
form: rockabyed
Etymology: From the nursery rhyme Rock-a-bye Baby, previously recorded as "Hush-a-by(e) baby"; blend of rock + lullaby or rock + -abye (as in hush-a-bye, from -a- (connective interfix) + bye (“goodbye, bye-bye”)).
Senses: examples: text: “We have a Chopin player in the house,” he said. And with a tiny smile he rockabyed the opening phrase of the Ballade and turned his head to look straight at Katie.
ref: 1952, Isabella Holt, Rampole Place, Bobbs-Merrill Company, page 258:
text: It was a pleasant day, the boat rockabyed in the slight chop and by late afternoon I was more nearly asleep than awake.
ref: 1969, Harold F. Blaisdell, The Philosophical Fisherman, Houghton Mifflin Company, page 228:
text: From the lowliest panhandler on the street to the worthiest recipient of today’s social security benefits we are being “spoiled rotten” and rockabyed to sleep to the strains of that haunting lullaby known as the Beggar-American Rhapsody “Gimme gimme, gimme gimme gimme.”
ref: 1969 December 19, Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 91ˢᵗ Congress, First Session, volume 115, part 30, Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, page 40353:
text: And lying down that night why should I hear the Brownsville trains that long had rockabyed me?
ref: 1975, Modern Poetry Studies, page 136:
text: Sprung rubber alarm clock: it bounced apart
 All over him: boingg: it loves him to death. The rubber loops contort, their moil and clench
 Rockabyeing him out of this world.
ref: 1982, Rowland Molony, “The Snake and the Lizard”, in Four Voices: Poetry from Zimbabwe, Books of Zimbabwe, →ISBN, page 8:
text: A contact lens may become scratched, chipped, discolored, contaminated, coated, warped, or desiccated. Poorly fit, it feels like grit or rockabyes out of the eyes.
ref: 1985, David D. Michaels, Visual Optics and Refraction: A Clinical Approach, →ISBN, page 576:
text: She, I noticed, was smiling, but that baby in the treetop might well have smiled as the wind rockabyed her down.
ref: 1992, Sonia Taitz, Mothering Heights: Reclaiming Motherhood from the Experts, William Morrow and Company, →ISBN, page 38:
text: Go to sleep, my darling boy, while mother rockabyes you with her tender hand.
ref: 1995, Jewish Currents, page 18:
text: He briefly rockabyed the tallow-colored visage in his arms, then with sudden unconcern handed it to Murph.
ref: 1995, Benjamin Taylor, Tales Out of School, Turtle Point Press, page 152:
text: Introibo, Here comes the Husband! View Halloo! Think of the North Pole, breathe in; I’ll buy you jewels, keep for me your keynote of martyrdom! Hey, rockabyed baby, is that everything? You’ve nothing more to say?
ref: 1998, Graham Dunstan Martin, transl., Jules Laforgue: Selected Poems, Penguin Books, page 71:
text: Simple as a child at night who dreams it’s light, he was light. Fallen. Rockabyed.
ref: 1999, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Never Be the Horse, University of Akron Press, →ISBN, page 53:
text: Down behind the piano Larry’s dragging out a shiny cylinder—of oxygen! Tenderly, he rockabyes it: “My baby Seymour—as in ‘emphyseymour.’ Next time I’ll bring his sister Ivy—I promise! She’s all tied up now in the ‘I-See-YOU.’”
ref: 2000, Irving Feldman, Beautiful False Things, Grove Press, →ISBN, page 90:
text: He closes his eyes and rockabyes his head.
ref: 2003, Puerto Del Sol, page 137:
text: As always, there are other things going on, notably a child being sung and rocked—rockabyed—to sleep.
ref: 2004, John Gordon, Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back, Syracuse University Press, →ISBN, page 280:
text: “Oh, well”—throwing up her fingers with drollery in her little flippant way—“we all go soppy for one third of our lives when baby’s ‘up a tree’ rockabyeing … But I can be pretty queerish in sleep; have visions, intuitions.[…]”
ref: 2008, M. P. Shiel, The Black Box, Ramble House, →ISBN, pages 43–44:
text: He takes out a dollar bill and lets go of it. It rockabyes to the sidewalk behind him, somersaults into the lawn, gets trapped by the blades of grass, and flaps there like a wounded bird.
ref: 2009, James Boice, NoVA, Scribner, page 309:
text: He’d been rockabyeing in a rockingchair, then on the bed, thickly rumpled.
ref: 2012, Joshua Cohen, Four New Messages, Graywolf Press:
text: The mild sunlight everyone takes for granted—the girl scraping out a sandcastle’s moat, the old man in the park sleeping as the sun rockabyes him—would incinerate you.
ref: 2014, Robert Thomas, Bridge, BOA Editions, Ltd., →ISBN:
text: A vrrr, vrrr, cruck, cruck, cruck lullaby finally rockabyed me back to sleep.
ref: 2015, Eleonora Nowak-Serwanski, Pacha: The Dog Who Changed My Life, Xlibris, →ISBN:
glosses: To rock soothingly.