Word.ws English Dictionary

asweep

asweep adverb: sweeping, making a sweeping motion.

Adverb

asweep (not comparable)

  1. Sweeping, making a sweeping motion.
    • the line that goes wavingly asweep round the base of the holy mountain, separating it from the common earth.1842, John Wilson, chapter 3, in The Recreations of Christopher North, volume 1, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, page 175
    • Where fierce hot winds have set the pine and myall boughs asweep1890, Banjo Paterson, “The Man from Snowy River”, in The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses, London: Macmillan, published 1896, page 49

Examples of asweep in a sentence

  • When winds are asweep through the Pecos Valley, they whimper and moan in the barbed-wire fence like troubled ghosts.1926, Walter Noble Burns, chapter 20, in The Saga of Billy the Kid, Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, page 294:
  • O’Neill, who was tall, pale and melancholy, with long white hair asweep, very like the picture of composers of my music book-covers.1962, Austin Clarke, chapter 4, in Twice Round the Black Church, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, page 36:
  • […] low and gently rolling hills, some forested, some asweep with velvety swaths of rippling, growing grain.1993, Dewey Lambdin, The Gun Ketch, New York: Donald J. Fine, Book 1, Chapter 1, p. 11:

Origin of asweep

From a- + sweep.

Questions about asweep

What does asweep mean?
Asweep means sweeping, making a sweeping motion.
How do you use asweep in a sentence?
When winds are asweep through the Pecos Valley, they whimper and moan in the barbed-wire fence like troubled ghosts.
What part of speech is asweep?
Asweep is an adverb.

Words near asweep in the dictionary

  1. asweddumization
  2. asweddumize
  3. asweddumized
  4. asweddumizes
  5. asweddumizing
  6. asweep
  7. aswel
  8. aswell
  9. aswell as
  10. Aswells
  11. aswim

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: asweep (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: “asweep.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/asweep. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.