Word.ws English Dictionary

begripe

/bɪˈɡɹaɪp/

begripe verb: to lay hold of; apprehend; grip; grasp.

Verb

begripe (third-person singular simple present begripes, present participle begriping, simple past and past participle begriped)

  1. (transitive) To lay hold of; apprehend; grip; grasp.
    • He, with his middle feet, begriped his paunch, And took the arms with the anterior; And then he bit both one and other cheek.1865, Dante Alighieri, The Comedy of Dante Allighieri. [sic]: Part I--The Hell
    • And as for this sword there shall never man begripe it at the handle but one, but he shall pass all other. In the name of God, said Percivale, I shall essay to handle it. So he set his hand to the sword, but he might not begripe it.1899, Sir Thomas Malory, Sir Edward Strachey, William Caxton, Le morte Darthur

Forms of begripe

third-person singular presentbegripes
present participlebegriping
past participlebegriped
pastbegriped

Origin of begripe

From Middle English begripen, bigripen, from Old English begrīpan (“to grip, seize, lay hold of; chide”), from Proto-West Germanic *bigrīpan. Equivalent to be- (“around, about”) + gripe.

Questions about begripe

What does begripe mean?
Begripe means to lay hold of; apprehend; grip; grasp.
What part of speech is begripe?
Begripe is a verb.
How do you pronounce begripe?
Begripe is pronounced /bɪˈɡɹaɪp/.
What is the past tense of begripe?
The past tense of begripe is begriped.

Words near begripe in the dictionary

  1. begrimes
  2. begrimest
  3. begrimeth
  4. begriming
  5. begrip
  6. begripe
  7. begriped
  8. begripes
  9. begriping
  10. begripping
  11. begroan

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: begripe (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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