Word.ws English Dictionary

empoison

empoison verb: to poison.

Verb

empoison (third-person singular simple present empoisons, present participle empoisoning, simple past and past participle empoisoned)

  1. To poison.
    • And therfore who someuer dyned or feested syre Gawayne wold comynly purueye for good fruyte for hym / and soo dyd the quene for to please sir Gawayne / she lete purueye for hym al maner of fruyte /[…]/ and this Pyonel hated syre Gawayne[…]for pure enuy & hate sir Pyonel enpoysond certayn appels for...1485, Sir Thomas Malory, “Tercium”, in Le Morte Darthur, book XVIII
    • She, with sweet words and false enticing smiles, / Infused love among the dainties set, / And with empoison'd cups our souls beguiles, / And made each knight himself and God forget.1600, Edward Fairfax, The Jerusalem Delivered of Tasso, X, lxv

Examples of empoison in a sentence

  • Shooting somebody, empoisoning him or hanging him give quite often more or less the same results.2000 September 1, Jerzy Karczmarczuk, “Separating algorithms from implementations (long)”, in comp.graphics.algorithms (Usenet):
  • Mag and Maureen do not represent an idealized, sentimentalized mother-and-child relationship; they are two unhappy, malignant harpies tearing and empoisoning each other.2006, Lilian Chambers, Eamonn Jordan, The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories, Peter Lang, →ISBN, page 29:

Forms of empoison

third-person singular presentempoisons
present participleempoisoning
past participleempoisoned
pastempoisoned

Origin of empoison

From Middle English empoisounen, impoisounen, from Old French empoisoner, equivalent to em- + poison.

Words formed from empoison

Questions about empoison

What does empoison mean?
Empoison means to poison.
How do you use empoison in a sentence?
Shooting somebody, empoisoning him or hanging him give quite often more or less the same results.
What part of speech is empoison?
Empoison is a verb.
What is the past tense of empoison?
The past tense of empoison is empoisoned.

Words near empoison in the dictionary

  1. empoascan
  2. empocket
  3. empodia
  4. empodial
  5. empodium
  6. empoison
  7. empoisoned
  8. empoisoner
  9. empoisoners
  10. empoisoning
  11. empoisonment

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: empoison (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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