Word.ws English Dictionary

overborn

overborn is the simple past and past participle of overbear.

Meaning of overbear

Verb

overbear (third-person singular simple present overbears, present participle overbearing, simple past overbore, past participle overborne)

  1. (obsolete, transitive) To carry over.
  2. (transitive) To push through by physical weight or strength; to overwhelm, overcome.
    • I attacked first and they were overborne, / Glad to apologize and even suing / Pardon for what they'd never thought of doing.1951, Geoffrey Chaucer, translated by Nevill Coghill, The Canterbury Tales: Translated into Modern English (Penguin Classics), Penguin Books, published 1977, page 287
  3. (transitive) To prevail over; to dominate, overpower; to oppress.
    • It often fals, in course of common life, / That right long time is overborne of wrong […].1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto XI”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  4. (intransitive) To produce an overabundance of fruit.

Questions about overborn

What is overborn the simple past and past participle of?
Overborn is the simple past and past participle of overbear.

Words near overborn in the dictionary

  1. overboots
  2. overbore
  3. overbored
  4. overbores
  5. overboring
  6. overborn
  7. overborne
  8. overborrow
  9. overborrowed
  10. overborrowing
  11. overborrows

Source and license

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