bedabble
English
Etymology
From be- + dabble.
Verb
bedabble (third-person singular simple present bedabbles, present participle bedabbling, simple past and past participle bedabbled)
- To dabble about or all over with moisture; make something wet by sprinkling or spattering water, paint, or other liquid on it.
- c. 1595–1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, “A Midsommer Nights Dreame”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, OCLC 606515358, [Act III, scene ii]:
- Bedabbled with the dew, and torn with briers,
I can no further crawl, no further go.
- 1751, John Hill, The Adventures of Mr. George Edwards, A Creole, London: T. Osborne, Chapter 7, p. 163,
- The rest was fill’d somewhat indiscriminately, with Philosophers, Antiquarians, Mathematicians, and Mechanics. A Scotch Peasant produc’d a New Orrery; a German Mechanic, a Table Fountain contriv’d to play in a Desert, to the great Entertainment, and Bedabbling of every body present […]
- 1848, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, Chapter 14,
- A vision of her pale, sweet face, with her bright hair all bedabbled with gore, seemed to float constantly before his aching eyes.
- 1912, Charles Egbert Craddoc (pseudonym of Mary Noailles Murfree), “The Crucial Moment” in The Raid of the Guerilla and Other Stories, Philadelphia: Lippincott,
- […] the weapon in Jeffrey's hand was discharged in his latest impulse of action after he fell to the floor, the blood gushing from a wound that crimsoned all the delicate whiteness of his shirt-front and bedabbled his snowy hair and beard.
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Translations
to make wet
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