whelm
Part of speech: verb
noun
Morphological type: simple
Etymology: From Middle English whelmen (“to turn over, capsize; to invert, turn upside down”), perhaps from Old English *hwealmnian, a variant of *hwealfnian, from hwealf (“arched, concave, vaulted; an arched or vaulted ceiling”), from Proto-West Germanic *hwalb, from Proto-Germanic *hwalbą (“arch, vault”), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷelp- (“to curve”).
Cognates
The English word is cognate with Dutch welven (“to arch”), Old Saxon bihwelvian (“to cover, hide”), German wölben (“to bend, curve, arch”), Icelandic hvelfa (“to overturn”), German Walm (“a vaulted roof”), Icelandic hvolf (“vaulted ceiling”), Ancient Greek κόλπος (kólpos, “bosom, hollow, gulf”).
The noun is derived from the verb.
Inflected forms:
form: whelms
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: whelming
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: whelmed
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: whelmed
pos: verb
tags: past
form: whelms
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: To bury, to cover; to engulf, to submerge.
pos: verb
tags: archaic
transitive
examples: Giue fire: ſhe is my prize, or Ocean whelme them all.
Still let me walk; for oft' the ſudden Gale / Ruffles the Tide, and ſhifts the dang'rous Sail, / Then ſhall the Paſſenger, too late, deplore / The whelming Billow, and the faithleſs Oar; [...]
Such is the fate of ſimple Bard, / On Life's rough ocean luckleſs ſtarr'd! / Unſkilful he to note the card / Of prudent Lore, / Till billows rage, and gales blow hard, / And whelm him o'er!
Deep-whelm'd beneath, in vast sepulchral caves, / Oblivion dwells amid unlabell'd graves; / The storied tomb, the laurell'd bust o'erturns, / And shakes their ashes from the mould'ring urns.
The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
gloss: To throw (something) over a thing so as to cover it.
pos: verb
tags: obsolete
transitive
examples: Gnats and Flies are very troubleſome in Houſes [...] Balls made of Horſe-dung and laid in a Room will do the ſame [attract gnats and flies] if they are new made; by which means you may whelm ſome things over them and keep them there.
gloss: To ruin or destroy.
pos: verb
tags: obsolete
transitive
examples: Here, where a Cæsar stood two thousand years ago, the traveller from another continent (though not from New Zealand) stands to-day, to muse—at Pæstum, as at Pompeii—on the fate which overtakes all human things, and at last whelms man and his works in one undistinguishable ruin.
In the twentieth night of the nine hundredth moon, as night came up the valley, I performed the mystic rites of each of the gods in the temple as is my wont, lest any of the gods should grow angry in the night and whelm us while we slept.
gloss: To overcome with emotion; to overwhelm.
pos: verb
tags: archaic
intransitive
examples: Hear Thou our plaint, when light is gone / And lawlessness and strife prevail. / Hear, lest the whelming weight of crime / Wreck us with life in view; / Lest thoughts and schemes of sense and time / Earn us a sinner's due.
gloss: To emotionally affect at an intensity in between underwhelm and overwhelm.
pos: verb
tags: colloquial
transitive
examples: Hey guys, Scott here with my first impressions of the Jason 10th anniversary patch. And I have to say I am I'm kind of just whelmed. Like it's I'm not disappointed and I'm not like blown away or excited by anything that I've seen here.
gloss: A surge of water.
pos: noun
tags: also
figuratively
poetic
examples: the whelm of the tide
I wonder about things and the people between us. The currents, the feedback, and the whelms. The sharp cracks between trees, and the tolling between the knees.
[...] I stood waiting, glad of a first tremor / Then caught up in the now-or-never whelm / Of one and all the full length of the train.
As our country developed, the clash of new immigrating cultures were all positioning themselves throughout the United States and their political leaders were individually striving for their own egotistical whelm of power [...]
gloss: A wooden drainpipe, a hollowed out tree trunk, turned with the cavity downwards to form an arched watercourse.
pos: noun
examples: A whelm was a wooden drainpipe, a hollowed-out tree trunk, "whelmed down" or turned with the concavity downwards to form an arched watercourse.
Derived words: overwhelm
underwhelm
unwhelm
whelming
whemmel
whemmle
whammel
whummel
whummle
Translations: