swell
Part of speech: verb
noun
adv
Morphological type: simple
Topics: entertainment
geography
geology
lifestyle
music
natural-sciences
Etymology: From Middle English swellen, from Old English swellan (“to swell”), from Proto-West Germanic *swellan, from Proto-Germanic *swellaną (“to swell”), of unknown origin.
Cognate with Saterland Frisian swälle (“to swell”), West Frisian swolle (“to swell”), Dutch zwellen (“to swell”), Low German swellen (“to swell”), German schwellen (“to swell”), Swedish svälla (“to swell”), Icelandic svella. The adjective may derive from the noun.
Inflected forms:
form: swells
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: swelling
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: swelled
pos: verb
tags: past
form: swole
pos: verb
tags: dialectal
past
form: swoll
pos: verb
tags: dialectal
past
form: swollen
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: swelled
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: swells
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: To become bigger, especially due to being engorged.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
examples: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
“If you drinks a drop more, Miss Lucy, you’ll just go like my pore young sister goed, […] Pop she did not. She swole … swole and swole.”
“You mean ‘swelled,’ Cookoo,” corrected Lucille […]
“[…] I say she swole—and what is more she swole clean into a dropsy.”
She had overheard her Mom and Mrs. Thomas from across the street talking about someone who was allergic to stings, and Mrs. Thomas had said, "Ten seconds after it gut im, poor ole Frank was swole up like a balloon. If he hadn't had his little kit with the hyperdermic^([sic]), I guess he woulda choked to death."
gloss: To cause to become bigger.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Rains and dissolving snow swell the rivers in spring.
Mildly it [the wind] kist our sailes, and, fresh, and sweet,
As, to a stomack sterv’d, whose insides meete,
Meate comes, it came; and swole our sailes, when wee
So joyd, as Sara’ her swelling joy’d to see.
’Tis low ebb sure with his Accuser, when such Peccadillos as these are put in to swell the Charge.
For this scene, a large number of supers are engaged, and in order to further swell the crowd, practically all the available stage hands have to ‘walk on’ dressed in various coloured dominoes, and all wearing masks.
After a harsh police crackdown last week fueled anger and swelled protests, President Dilma Rousseff, a former guerrilla who was imprisoned under the dictatorship and has now become the target of pointed criticism herself, tried to appease dissenters by embracing their cause on Tuesday.
gloss: To grow gradually in force or loudness.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
examples: The organ music swelled.
gloss: To cause to grow gradually in force or loudness.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: It commenced with a slow crescendo, so irresistibly lugubrious that two of our dogs at once raised their heads and swelled their voices into a responsive tremolo, which may have been heard and appreciated by their distant relatives.
gloss: To raise to arrogance; to puff up; to inflate.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: to be swelled with pride or haughtiness
gloss: To be raised to arrogance.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
examples: Why, here he comes, swelling like a turkey-cock.
[…] you swell at the sight of tartan, as the bull is said to do at scarlet.
gloss: To be elated; to rise arrogantly.
pos: verb
examples: In all things else above our humble fate
Your equal mind yet swells not into state,
But like some mountain in those happy Isles
Where in perpetual Spring young Nature smiles,
Your greatnesse shows:
gloss: To be turgid, bombastic, or extravagant.
pos: verb
examples: swelling words  a swelling style
gloss: To protuberate; to bulge out.
pos: verb
examples: A cask swells in the middle.
gloss: The act of swelling; increase in size.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
gloss: A bulge or protuberance.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
gloss: Increase of power in style, or of rhetorical force.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
examples: Concentrated are his arguments, select and distinct and orderly his topics, ready and unfastidious his expressions, popular his allusions, plain his illustrations, easy the swell and subsidence of his periods […]
gloss: A long series of ocean waves, generally produced by wind, and lasting after the wind has ceased.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
examples: the heave of a heavy ocean swell
There was a great, smooth swell upon the sea.
Now they were faced with the problem of a northerly blow, which could soon send a heavy swell clean into the bay.
The Tilbury-Gravesend foot passenger ferry fights its way through a high swell on the river Thames on February 16 2022.
gloss: A gradual crescendo followed by diminuendo.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
examples: He was thinking; but the glory of the song, the swell from the great organ, the clustered lights, […], the height and vastness of this noble fane, its antiquity and its strength—all these things seemed to have their part as causes of the thrilling emotion that accompanied his thoughts.
gloss: A device for controlling the volume of a pipe organ.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
gloss: A division in a pipe organ, usually the largest enclosed division.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
gloss: A hillock or similar raised area of terrain.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
examples: Off on the crest of a swell a moving figure was seen now and then. "Antelope," said the hunters.
gloss: An upward protrusion of strata from whose central region the beds dip quaquaversally at a low angle.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
gloss: A person who is stylish, fancy, or elegant.
pos: noun
tags: countable
dated
informal
uncountable
examples: It costs him no more to wear all his ornaments about his distinguished person than to leave them at home. If you can be a swell at a cheap rate, why not?
He was dressed in a flashy style, not unlike what is popularly denominated a swell.
Between the two extremes of college men the unsocial dig and the flunking swell, lies the majority, who, acknowledging the duty and merit of hard work, see the value in social and recreative line, but are at somewhat of a loss, seemingly, how to proportionize the time given to the different sides of college life, or how far to allow themselves to go on the more attractive side.
gloss: A person of high social standing; an important person.
pos: noun
tags: countable
informal
uncountable
examples: "I am not in Mr Crosbie's confidence. He is in the General Committee Office, I know; and, I believe, has pretty nearly the management of the whole of it."
"I'll tell you what he is, Bell; Mr Crosbie is a swell." And Lilian Dale was right; Mr Crosbie was a swell.
“I,” said Binet, “once saw a piece called the ‘Gamin de Paris,’ in which there was the character of an old general that is really hit off to a T. He sets down a young swell, who had seduced a working girl, who at the end———”
The only sensible man I came across was the cabman who drove me about. A broken-down swell he was, I fancy.
You buy a lot of Indian or halfbreed loafers with beaver-skins and rum, go to the Mount of the Burning Arrows, and these fellows dance round you and call you one of the lost race, the Mighty Men of the Kimash Hills. And they'll do that while the rum lasts. Meanwhile you get to think yourself a devil of a swell—you and the gods!
‘[…] Colleoni’s going to take over this place from you, and he’s got his lawyer. A man in London. A swell.’
gloss: The front brow of a saddle bow, connected in the tree by the two saddle bars to the cantle on the other end.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
gloss: Very well.
pos: adv
tags: Canada
US
informal
not-comparable
examples: “That lousy ring wasn’t worth no grand. I did swell to get two centuries for it.”
“[…] Last August, when I left The Walls, I figured I had every chance to start new. I got a job in Olathe, lived with my family, and stayed home nights. I was doing swell—”
Derived words: outswell
overswell
preswell
reswell
swellability
swellable
swellage
swellfish
swellhead
swell hell
swell out
swellshark
swell the ranks
swelltoad
swell up
swelly
unswell
ground swell
groundswell
knee swell
one swell foop
shrink-swell
swell box
swelldom
swell-headed
swellish
swell mob
swell-mobsman
swell organ
underswell
upswell
Venetian swell
wind swell
Translations:
lang: Swahili
word: kivimbe