uplean

English

Etymology

Etymology tree
Proto-Indo-European *upó
Proto-Germanic *ub
Proto-Germanic *upp
Proto-West Germanic *upp
Old English up
Old English ūp-
Middle English up-
English up-
English lean
English uplean

    From up- + lean.

    Verb

    uplean (third-person singular simple present upleans, present participle upleaning, simple past and past participle upleant or upleaned)

    1. (ambitransitive, literary) To lean or incline upward; to cause (something) to lean upward.
      • 1834, Albert Pike, “Sunset” in Prose Sketches and Poems Written in the Western Country, Boston: Light & Horton, pp. 192-193,[1]
        The western sky is wallen
        With shadowy mountains, built upon the marge
        Of the horizon, from eve’s purple sheen,
        And thin gray clouds, that daringly uplean
        Their silver cones upon the crimson verge
        Of the high zenith,
      • 1856, Gold-Pen (pseudonym), “My Cottage” in Poems, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 2nd edition, pp. 188-189,[2]
        I forced the slowly yielding door
        That ope’d on Sabbath morn no more,
        And found all that the winds withstood,
        Was an upleaning piece of wood.
      • 1895, Orelia Key Bell, “And every morning as I passed her bower” in Poems, Philadelphia: Rodgers, p. 181,[3]
        […] that liquid cadency
        Seep’d thro’ the casement to the birds and me,
        Who upleaning drank, and drinking upleaned more.
      • 1902, George Macdonald Major, “A Chinatown Idyll” in Lays of Chinatown, New York: The Lloyd Press, 2nd edition, p. 64,[4]
        A rakish hat was tilted o’er his eyes.
        A cigarette, with intermittent fire,
        Upleaned to meet it from his stern set lips.
      • 1912, John Muir, chapter 14, in The Yosemite,‎[5], New York: Century, published 1920, page 244:
        […] the snow which covered the glacier was melted into upleaning, icy blades which were extremely difficult to cross […]
    2. (intransitive, obsolete, rare) To lean (on something).

    Anagrams

    This page is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.