Word.ws English Dictionary

overborne

overborne 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 overborne

What is overborne the simple past and past participle of?
Overborne is the simple past and past participle of overbear.

Words near overborne in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: overborne (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “overborne.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/overborne. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.