Word.ws English Dictionary

dwale

/dweɪl/

dwale noun: belladonna or a similar soporific plant.

Noun

dwale (countable and uncountable, plural dwales)

  1. Belladonna or a similar soporific plant.
    • Beneath and around the clumps of ragged moss-grown elder and hoary stunted whitethorn (...) rise thickets of tall nettles and rank hemlock, concealing the deadly but alluring dwale —1842, J. van Voorst, The Phytologist, page 595
    • All parts of the dwale are poisonous, said to resemble snake bite, but the roots are said to be four or five times as virulent as the rest of the plant.1934, Chambers's Journal, page 198
  2. (archaic) A sleeping-potion, especially one made from belladonna.
    • The authors studied the ingredients and method of administration to try to ascertain whether dwale was effective, and they found it certainly could have worked.2007, Barbara S. Bowers, The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice, page 197
    • 'That is all?' Payne askes. 'You need no salve? No dwale?'2016, Toby Clements, Broken Faith, page 258
  3. (dialectal) A torpor.
    • He's in a dwale, a dead sleep; a common expression in the North of England.1874, Charles Mackay, The Lost Beauties of the English Language, page 54
    • I stayed up there in a dwale – not seeing, not even thinking – until suddenly the wind got up and its chill woke me.2008, Mary Leared, A Horseshoe Clown, page 44
  4. A bugbear.
    • Consume us; shake the darkness like a tree, And fill the night with mischiefs, — blights and dwales, Weevils, and rots, and cankers!1856, Sydney Dobell, England in Time of War - Issue 34, page 72
    • Tickle under their chins microscopical djinns or tease geloscopical dwales who live in The Tree That Can Never Be and fish for chocolate whales?1981, Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat, page 384

Verb

dwale (third-person singular simple present dwales, present participle dwaling, simple past and past participle dwaled)

  1. (dialectal) To mutter deliriously.

dwale meaning in Bengali

dwale in Bengali

মাদক, বিষ, অন্ধকার, অস্পষ্টতা

Examples of dwale in a sentence

  • It was not bog myrtle at all, it was dwale.2014, Jenny Harper, Face the Wind and Fly:
  • Monkshood and dwale belong to Hecate, the moon goddess of the witches, and by their use are witches able to fly.2014, Karen Maitland, The Vanishing Witch:
  • Dwale was a solution of wine mixed with a number of other ingredients, Some were pretty mile, like lettuce and boar bile.2018, The World of Lore, Volume 3, The World of Lore, Volume 3:
  • Cadell agrees the vial contains arsenic, not willow bark, and it is no wonder Rollo found relief from what was in the flask since it isn't wine but dwale.2020, Sarah Woodbury, Chevalier:

Forms of dwale

Noun
pluraldwales
Verb
third-person singular presentdwales
present participledwaling
past participledwaled
pastdwaled

Origin of dwale

From Middle English dwale (“stupor; deception; delusion, evil”), from Old English dwala, dwola (“error, heresy; doubt; madman, deceiver, heretic”) and Old Norse dvala (“sleep, stupor”).

From Middle English dwalen, from Old English dwalian, from Proto-Germanic *dwalōną, from Proto-Indo-European *dʰwelH- (“to make turbid”).

Words that rhyme with dwale

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about dwale

What does dwale mean?
Dwale means belladonna or a similar soporific plant.
What is dwale in Bengali?
Dwale in Bengali is মাদক, বিষ, অন্ধকার. See Dwale meaning in Bengali.
How do you use dwale in a sentence?
It was not bog myrtle at all, it was dwale.
What part of speech is dwale?
Dwale can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce dwale?
Dwale is pronounced /dweɪl/.
What is the plural of dwale?
The plural of dwale is dwales.

Words near dwale in the dictionary

  1. dwaggy
  2. dwagon
  3. dwagons
  4. DWAI
  5. Dwain
  6. dwale
  7. dwaled
  8. dwales
  9. dwaling
  10. dwallow
  11. dwallowed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dwale (page history and authors); dwale (Bengali Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-dwale.wav.

Cite this entry: “dwale.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dwale. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.