embay
embay verb: to bathe; to steep.
Verb (1)
embay (third-person singular simple present embays, present participle embaying, simple past and past participle embayed)
- To bathe; to steep.
- Sweete Loue, that doth his golding wings embay / In bleſſed Nectar, and pure Pleaſures well[…].1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto XI”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, page 560
- Their ſwords both points and edges ſharpe embay / In purple bloud, where ſo they hit or light[…]1600, [Torquato Tasso], “The Twelfth Booke of Godfrey of Bulloigne”, in Edward Fairefax [i.e., Edward Fairfax], transl., Godfrey of Bulloigne, or The Recouerie of Ierusalem. […], London: […] Ar[nold]...
Verb (2)
embay (third-person singular simple present embays, present participle embaying, simple past and past participle embayed)
- To shut in, enclose, shelter or trap, such as ships in a bay.
- Hebrew the profile, every line; / But as in haven fringed with palm, / Which Indian reefs embay from harm, / Belulled as in the vase the wine— / Red budded corals in remove, / Peep coy through quietudes above; […]1876, Herman Melville, “Canto XVII”, in Walter E. Bezanson, editor, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land […], New York, N.Y.: Hendricks House, published 1960, →OCLC, part I (Jerusalem)...
- Herself the only daughter of a struggling man of letters, she had during the last year or two taken to writing poems, in an endeavour to find a congenial channel in which to let flow her painfully embayed emotions, whose former limpidity and sparkle seemed departing in the stagnation caused by the...1912, Thomas Hardy, “An Imaginative Woman”, in Life’s Little Ironies […], New York, N.Y.; London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, →OCLC, page 7
Forms of embay
| third-person singular present | embays |
|---|---|
| present participle | embaying |
| past participle | embayed |
| past | embayed |
| alternative form | imbay |
Origin of embay
From em- + bay (“bathe”).
From em- + bay.
Questions about embay
- What does embay mean?
- Embay means to bathe; to steep.
- What part of speech is embay?
- Embay is a verb.
- What is the past tense of embay?
- The past tense of embay is embayed.
Words near embay in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: embay (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: “embay.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/embay. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.