adaw
/əˈdɔː/
adaw verb: to daunt, overcome, subdue.
Verb (1)
adaw (third-person singular simple present adaws, present participle adawing, simple past and past participle adawed)
- To daunt, overcome, subdue.
- He, comming home at undertime, there found / The fayrest creature, that he euer saw, / Sitting beside his mother on the ground; / The sight whereof did greatly him adaw.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto VII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 13
- But friezing colde adawes the frying heate[…]1583, Brian Melbancke, Philotimus. The warre betwixt nature and fortune, page 123
Verb (2)
adaw (third-person singular simple present adaws, present participle adawing, simple past and past participle adawed)
- To awaken, arouse.
- And hir awook, and thus to hir he cried, "Woman, what is that, that in thin hand I see? What hast thou doon, woman, for him that diede, What wickid spirit hath travaylid the?" And as sone as that adawed was she, The knyfe fel oute of hir hand in the bedde, And she bihilde the cloothis al forbledde...1544, Gesta Romanorum
- The soulles body about the bed did sprall, / While they about it on the King did call, / Adawing him as if he wer in swound: / But all for nought, he had his deadly wound.1560, William Baldwin, The funeralles of King Edward the sixt
Examples of adaw in a sentence
- They perceiving, and being adawed at his constancy and resolution, took the advantage of a darke night, and fled every man of them, by that way out of the rock.1658, James Ussher, The annals of the world deduced from the origin of time, page 249:
- To arrive to knowledge is to have an itinerary, a passage out of dreaming, to adaw, to be awake (délit).2021, Iraklis Ioannidis, Altruism or the Other as the Essence of Existence:
Forms of adaw
| third-person singular present | adaws |
|---|---|
| present participle | adawing |
| past participle | adawed |
| past | adawed |
Origin of adaw
Inherited from Middle English adawen (“to terminate, defeat”), from adawe (“dead, nonexistent”), from a- (“of”) + dawe, dawen, Early Middle English dative plurals of day (“day”).
Inherited from Middle English adawen (“to dawn, arise, awaken”), from a- + dawen (“to dawn”).
Questions about adaw
- What does adaw mean?
- Adaw means to daunt, overcome, subdue.
- How do you use adaw in a sentence?
- They perceiving, and being adawed at his constancy and resolution, took the advantage of a darke night, and fled every man of them, by that way out of the rock.
- What part of speech is adaw?
- Adaw is a verb.
- How do you pronounce adaw?
- Adaw is pronounced /əˈdɔː/.
- What is the past tense of adaw?
- The past tense of adaw is adawed.
Words near adaw in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: adaw (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “adaw.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/adaw. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.