Word.ws English Dictionary

empayre

empayre is the obsolete form of impair.

Meaning of impair

Verb

impair (third-person singular simple present impairs, present participle impairing, simple past and past participle impaired)

  1. (transitive) To weaken; to affect negatively; to have a diminishing effect on.
    • In 2016, it was announced that Jones had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia, a form of dementia that impairs the ability to communicate.2020 January 22, Stuart Jeffries, “Terry Jones obituary”, in The Guardian
  2. (archaic, intransitive) To grow worse; to deteriorate.
    • Flesh may empaire,[…]but reason can repaire.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto VII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

See all 6 meanings of impair

Forms of empayre

third-person singular presentempayres
present participleempayring
past participleempayred
pastempayred

Questions about empayre

What is empayre the obsolete form of?
Empayre is the obsolete form of impair.

Words near empayre in the dictionary

  1. empathyless
  2. empawn
  3. empawned
  4. empawning
  5. empawns
  6. empayre
  7. empayred
  8. empayres
  9. empayring
  10. EMPD
  11. empeach

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: empayre (page history and authors); impair (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: “empayre.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/empayre. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.