Word.ws English Dictionary

emperil

emperil is the obsolete spelling of imperil.

Meaning of imperil

Verb

imperil (third-person singular simple present imperils, present participle (US) imperiling or (UK) imperilling, simple past and past participle (US) imperiled or (UK) imperilled)

  1. (transitive) To put into peril; to place in danger.
    • […]they occupied the country, expelled the inhabitants, and terminated for ever the rivalry which had so long imperilled their own naval supremacy in Greece.1879, F. D. Morice, Pindar, chapter 10, page 169
    Synonyms:
    endanger
  2. (transitive) To risk or hazard.

Forms of emperil

third-person singular presentemperils
present participle USemperiling
present participle UKemperilling
past participle USemperiled
past USemperiled
past participle UKemperilled
past UKemperilled

Questions about emperil

What is emperil the obsolete spelling of?
Emperil is the obsolete spelling of imperil.

Words near emperil in the dictionary

  1. emperess
  2. emperesses
  3. emperialism
  4. emperical
  5. emperies
  6. emperil
  7. emperiled
  8. emperiling
  9. emperilled
  10. emperilling
  11. emperils

Source and license

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